Hussein Wfu 0248M 11504.Pdf

SICK & TIRED OF THESE BROKEN PROMITHES PROMITHES: NAVIGATING THE SEDUCTIVE FALSEHOOD OF BLACK REPRESENTATION AND THE IN(TER)VENTION OF BLACK GUERILLA EXPRESSIONISM

NADIA A HUSSEIN

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of

WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Communication

May, 2020

Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Approved By:

Ron Von Burg, PhD, Advisor

Alessandra Von Burg, PhD, Chair

Rowena Kirby-Straker, PhD

Calvin Warren, PhD

Acknowledgements

First, to the One that makes all things possible. I thank Allah (SWT) Next, to the people that have provided me with unconditional, nurturing, and healing familial love throughout my journey. Hooyo, Abbo, Habo Faisa, Nasra, Naderia, Nimo, Abdinasir, Abdirizak, Amal, Habo Asia, Habo Nimco, Habo Aisha, Adeero Farah and so many more I can’t begin to list. Without you, I would not have been able to even attempt my dreams. To my Black Co-mentors, who supported me through the trenches, talked with me through my anxieties and heartbreaks, and celebrated my process. Sunhee, Karease, Chad, Nicole, Ashley, Brooke, Vida, Mako, Zainab, Sadia, Hana, Ladan, Geo, Anthony, Coco, Heaven, Willie. Our conversations educated, propelled and inspired my commitments to study the phenomena of Black life, y’all have expanded my understanding of family. To my found family members, who gifted me countless times with their hilarious conversations, thoughtful advice, and caring friendship. Civi, Taylor, Janet, Colin. You have enabled my growth in ways that I am endlessly grateful for, I’m so happy to share my life with you. To the Black Professionals of the Academy, who meet with me in the margins and provided me with the necessary support to embark on my projects. Amber, Calvin, Candice, Rita, Rowie, Jo, Nathan, William, Angela, Lydia. I would have dropped out a long time ago without your guidance. To the Black Debaters, whose rhetoric and performance inspired my search for stories beyond the limits of human rhetoric. Bintou, Aysia, Acia, Iyana, Lynn, Raveen, Jada, Hannah, Brianna, Ryan, Michael. Thank you for letting me watch your performances and I can’t wait to see where you go from here To my Wake professors, whose constant support and active defense of my work against rampant anti-Black departmental discourse of white civility and “debate privilege.” Ron and Alessandra. I hope you continue your efforts so incoming Black Graduate students also have the space to build their thoughts. And Finally thank you to grad student me, Nadia Hussein, girl there were a lot of times I thought we weren’t gonna make it, but you really stuck through it and did that shit. I hope you’re proud!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT IV

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 1: IT ENDS TRAGICALLY: NAVIGATING THE SEDUCTIVE POLITICS OF BLACK RE- PRESENTATION 34

CHAPTER 2: MAKING YOUR OWN STORY: RECKONING AND REIMAGING THE REPRESENTATIONAL LIMITS OF THE ARCHIVE 80

CHAPTER 3: DIRTY IF YOU WERE DIFFERENT: THE EROTIC PATHOLOGIZATION OF BLACK FEMME EXCESS AND THE RADICAL POTENTIAL OF CRITICAL FABULATION 114

WORKS CITED 129

CURRICULUM VITAE 144

III

Abstract:

Representation Matters is an utterance that is often evoked to uncover the ways globalized anti-Blackness constructs forms of exclusion within media and culture. The phrase acts as a kind of perceptible measure for the assumed racial progress of civil society, as the presence of Black bodies in powerful positions attempts to serve as verification that the horrors of slavery and genocide are simply the unfortunate effects of past mistakes rather than an enduring legacy of gratuitous violence. My thesis plans on analyzing how the visibility of racialized and gendered bodies, especially those made visible for entertainment, are intertwined within the onto-metaphysically violent process of obliterating the Other, particularly the Black nonbeing. My analysis hopes to unveil representation as a fraudulent measure for progress and examine representation as an epistemological tool that employs rhetorical arguments designed to fortify the anti-Black logic that maintains civil society. My thesis will focus on how Black representation within American popular culture is implicated within the politics of the archive, a collection of historical records, iconography, and documents which provides an assumed public memory and intimate insight on the inner workings of a place, institution, or group of people within an event. In addition, I reflect on critical fabulation as an in(ter)vention of the archive and representation. The practice of reimagining the Black social life challenges the Western Canon of the archive which relegates the genealogy of Black feminist epistemology into zones of death. My thesis will compare these narratives to demonstrate the ontological violence of the archive then use the process of critical fabulation to explain the radical potential of telling stories of Black life in events of social death.

Introduction “Grandad always making some shit up about history… Man, he made up Catcher Freeman. Shoot, he probably made up this whole ‘slavery’ thing. What nigga you know gonna work all day in the field for no paper? Riley Freeman, The Boondocks

Nigga You Tryna Get Off the Plantation by Selling a Script? The False Promise of Representation

1 Calvin L. Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Duke University Press, 2018).

nonbeing. 2 My analysis hopes to unveil representation as a fraudulent measure for progress and examine representation as an epistemological tool that employs rhetorical arguments designed to fortify the anti-Black logic that maintains civil society.

Demands for improved racial and gender representation with mainstream

American popular culture are not limited to the literal visual or numeric representation.

For example, the increase in racially and sexually diverse characters in the fourth phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are still encoded within the overall narrative structure that control the inclusion and exclusion of marginalized bodies. The wildly successful

Black Panther promotes Wakanda as a fictional mecca of Black Power only to unceremoniously decimate the country and kill of the royal family (visibly murdering the

T’Challa in Avengers: Infinity War while retroactively killing Shuri in Avengers:

Endgame promotional material) to service the larger narrative interests of the cinematic universe that centers on the progression of the white heteronormative characters.

Narrative choices that structure the conditions of Black representation impart particular implicit discourses that spectators can voyeuristically consume as realistic or normative statements about Blackness (non)place within civil society. My study seeks to examine how Black bodies are represented in media to demonstrate how those representations metaphysically interpellate Blackness into zones of objectification, the process of dehumanization that relegates a person’s subjecthood to an agentless commodity.

Researchers argue that Black representation within globalized media functions as an

2 Saidiya Hartman, “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (July 1, 2018): 465–90, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-6942093; Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81, https://doi.org/10.2307/464747; Kellee E. Warren, “We Need These Bodies, but Not Their Knowledge: Black Women in the Archival Science Professions and Their Connection to the Archives of Enslaved Black Women in the French Antilles,” Library Trends 64, no. 4 (2016): 776–94, https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2016.0012.

affective channel, a mediating technology designed to manipulate the transitional feelings of change in civil society to overwrite those feelings with logics of anti-Blackness. 3 I will explore how these representations strongly influence and deteriorate the embodied subjectivities of Black people within civil society. Pop culture is a necessary site for rhetorical artifacts because it is reflective of the society that produced them. They can strongly influence the societal discourse that informs how we perceive marginalized bodies with that society. As our own program at Wake Forest incorporates critical media studies in the interdisciplinary field of communication, film and mass media artifact must be understood as rhetorical texts key to deepening our understanding of global media and visual communication.

My thesis will focus on how Black representation within American popular culture is implicated within the politics of the archive, a collection of historical records, iconography, and documents which provides an assumed public memory and intimate insight on the inner workings of a place, institution, or group of people within an event.

The archive is normatively understood as an accumulation of historical records that helps provide information on a group of people, institutions, and societies. From the inception of the Middle Passage, slaves were only recorded, therefore included, in the archive as commercial exchanges or censored accounts of gratuitous racial, sexual, and gendered violence. The archive limits the practice of remembering and telling the stories of

Blackness to events that capture what I define as the rhetoric of the intimate, interactions between Black and nonBlack people that uphold the human/nonhuman dynamics

3 David Ponton, “Clothed in Blue Flesh: Police Brutality and the Disciplining of Race, Gender, and the ‘Human,’” Theory & Event 19, no. 3 (July 8, 2016), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/623994; Demetria Shabazz, “Racializing ‘the Male Gaze’: Images of Black Women in American Cinema,” Conference Papers -- International Communication Association , Annual Meeting 2008, 1.

established through colonialization and the enslavement of Blackness. The archive operationalizes this into “objective evidence” which supports the ontological violence of the rhetoric of the public, an anti-Black assemblage which regulates and organizes the rhetoric of the intimate into metaphysical statements that can be made about Blackness.

The rhetoric of the public also establishes positions of subjecthood/objecthood that sustains dynamics of power enforced since the Middle Passage. The archive weaponizes these rhetorical strategies and circulates them to sustain globalized anti-Blackness and racial capitalism. 4 The archive’s targeted censoring is what makes it an insidious epistemological source that attempts “to conceal and disallow” the lived history of the gratuitous violence of chattel slavery. 5 The archive creates an anti-Black epistemology that only knows the Black body through abject subjugation and purges histories that speak to the lived experiences of the subaltern. What is particularly alarming about the present absence of the lives of the enslaved is that this purged history renders the Black body malleable to the white imaginary’s manipulation. The representation of Black people within the archive of entertainment demands particular focus because the representation of Black bodies within American popular culture demonstrate how

Blackness’ visuality is employed to simultaneously be a false symbol of progress and an always available vessel for white fantasies.

My argument demands that the rhetorical tradition must divest itself from their normative forum and form to reconsider what can be a rhetorical space and artifact.

4 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (June 1, 2008): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1; Stephanie E. Smallwood, “The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved,” History of the Present 6, no. 2 (2016): 117, https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.6.2.0117; Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (October 1985): 204–42, https://doi.org/10.1086/448327. 5 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” June 1, 2008.

Rhetoric must realize its in situ positioning within, not outside of, “a well-developed sociological imagination” crafted by social formation of Western (post)modernity center upon the overrepresentation of the Human. 6 Traditional rhetorical space assumes a progressive, homonomous civil society where the universal liberal Human subject can utilize his phronesis, or practical virtue, to democratically engage with public institutions

(or collectives of Human subjects) to gradually “change common culture or thinking.” 7

This universal Human subject generates intellectual legitimacy through its historical canon that both over-represents and over-limits objects of study to ties the realization of

Freedom to “the rhetorical and communicative processes of this thing called the West

[emphasis mine.]” 8 The processes of Westernization, conditions bodies who “could not mark themselves linearly” to aspire towards any form of inclusion into the canon of

Humanity, “ even if it was delivered through racial violence,” as certification of the benevolence of the Human subject.

The normative forum and form of cultural rhetorical criticism is an ineffective method for learning about how the rhetorical force of globalized antiBlackness impacts emancipated Black bodies, or Free Black. Adherence to this model within cultural rhetorical criticisms of Black Representation is especially problematic because it prescribes artifacts within “public sphere discourse” the neoliberal facility to “influence the values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of the public” through the liberal myth of

6 While this work is expounds upon the work of James Aune, I do not endorse any aspect of Aune’s personal life and stand with his victims Peter Simonson, “Rhetoric as a Sociological Problem,” Argumentation and Advocacy 50, no. 4 (March 2014): 242–52, https://doi.org/10.1080/00028533.2014.11821825. 7 Steven B. Hunt, “An Essay on Publishing Standards for Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication Studies 54, no. 3 (September 2003): 378–84, https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970309363295. 8 “Whither the ‘Human’? An Open Letter to the ‘Race and Rhetoric’ Forum,” accessed March 10, 2020, https://www.academia.edu/38023118/Whither_the_Human_An_Open_Letter_to_the_Race_and_Rhetori c_Forum.

equal opportunity exchange. 9 The normative forum and form mistakenly presume Free

Blacks can engage in a public “transactional event” within the presumed egalitarian

“ratios between agent and agency, act and scene, etc” to create a moment/movement of linear progression. 10 This presumption obscures descriptions of how antiBlackness substantiates itself not through public moments of spectacular violence, but through the intimate and quotidian governing “logic of exclusion and the logic of obliteration.” 11

Rhetorician Armond Towns’ critique of racial rhetorical criticism explains how the

“Black body” 12 actually participates as the invisible center of this imaginary not as a fellow liberal Human subject but “as a central technology of Western humanization .” 13

Free Blacks as a technology of Humanity disarticulates the communicative model of

Human exchange because it reveal how Black bodies can only participate in Human exchanges as “in error” or as “a presentation disappeared by not seeing.” 14

Rhetorical space must account for how raciality communicatively produces a heteronomous civil society that criminalizes the Free Black with an impractical intuition, which I term as niggativity. Niggativity pathologizes Free Black as unfit to productively participate in ‘worthy’ democratic engagements without the authorization of whiteness.

Niggativity casts emancipated Black people as “abject figures,” or mythic, chaotic agents whose uninhibited passions should be perceived as existential threats to the imposed

Order of Human-as-Man. To police this threat, the logic of exclusion is deployed to mark

9 Hunt, “An Essay on Publishing Standards for Rhetorical Criticism.” 10 Hunt. 11 Denise Ferreira da Silva, “The Racial Limits of Social Justice: The Ruse of Equality of Opportunity and the Global Affirmative Action Mandate,” Critical Ethnic Studies 2, no. 2 (2016): 184–209, https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.2.2.0184. 12 The Black body refer to Towns’ definition of “enactments of racial violence as productive of something that we call ‘Blackness’” “Whither the ‘Human’?” 13 “Whither the ‘Human’?” 14 Warren, Ontological Terror .

Blackness with a waywardness that is culpable for its own objectification, despite being

“gifted” the opportunity of emancipation and other liberal projects of inclusion. The logic of exclusion venerates this demarcation of Blackness as self-defeating through public performances that repeats an insidious narrative structure. This narrative structure affectively conditions Black audiences into internalizing their heteronomous position as

“no bodies” as a preordained and obligatory status indispensable to the sanctity and continuation of the everyday events of Human life. 15 The logic of obliteration safeguards the logic of exclusion through establishing a punitive system of disposability that surveils and polices Free Blacks into either assimilating or being expunged. This system of disposability permeates throughout the public and private space, as cultural works and interpersonal interactions either stigmatize or reward Black people based on their adherence to white expectations. Examining Black Representation with the lens of the

“everyday, ephemeral, and mundane rhetorical action” of anti-Blackness is critical to creating expressive rhetorical criticism that reckons with the intact and growing racial architecture of American slavery and genocide. 16

Intimate exchanges 17 contain a rhetorical and affective force that “influence social collectivities, large and small.” 18 Despite the lack of performed address or homogeneous participation, interpersonal interactions are necessary rhetorical artifacts because they

15 Silva, “The Racial Limits of Social Justice.” 16 George F. McHendry Jr et al., “Rhetorical Critic(Ism)’s Body: Affect and Fieldwork on a Plane of Immanence,” Southern Communication Journal 79, no. 4 (September 1, 2014): 293–310, https://doi.org/10.1080/1041794X.2014.906643. 17 I use the word intimate here to outline how unplanned, interpersonal interactions carry with them an emotional excess that exceed that capture of language but nevertheless influences communicative transaction taking place 18 Jr et al., “Rhetorical Critic(Ism)’s Body.”

reveal how bodies immanently participate 19 within and are scripted by the logics of exclusion and obliteration. Drawing upon Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, I argue that Humanity-as-Western-Man was established as an enthymeme during the expropriation of Western colonialism to justify native genocide and chattel slavery. This enthymeme of Humanity maintains its sticky afterlife through strategies of rhetorical manipulation concealed within racial relationality and social formation. The rhetoric of the intimate 20 facilitates this manipulation by reconstructing moments of inescapable, miscegenational interactions into democratic, equal exchanges that eradicates the reality of the compromised positionality of enslavement. This reconstruction forecloses the likelihood of genuine consent and agency for those who occupy the abject objecthood of

Blackness. The occlusion of Black consent’s (im)possibility is accomplished through the fungibility of Black flesh, which continuously transmogrifies the Black body into “raw material and an expression of spatial expansion used for hu(Man) ascendancy under conquest.” 21 Black consent then needs to be understood as a fraught rhetorical move, 22 that operates as an affective commodity, or a display of performed Black feeling. 23 This feeling is then transformed into immaterial labor that symbolically/metaphorically

19 “Immanent participation focuses on the affective dimensions of in situ research, insisting that in situ rhetorical critics analyze how people build affective bonds and collective subjectivities.” Jr et al. 20 The rhetoric of the intimate is a term I coin to articulate how interpersonal interactions function as artifacts of rhetorical discourse that communicates the metaphysical positions of disparate bodies following the social formations that rhetorically/affectively justify the creation of American slavery and genocide as naturalized, immutable, and divine conceived even during eras of “reform” 21 Tiffany Lethabo King, “The Labor of (Re)Reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(Ly),” Antipode 48, no. 4 (2016): 1022–39, https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12227. 22 A persuasive tactic during intersubjective exchanges that operates within the affective economy to translate extralinguistic feeling into socially enforced meanings 23 Here I am referring to Tyrone Palmer’s definition of Black feeling as an affective excess of Black expression that is intuitions of whiteness seek to examine and regulate Tyrone S. Palmer, “‘What Feels More Than Feeling?’: Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect,” Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 2 (2017): 31, https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.2.0031.

provides institutions of whiteness a re-presentation of postracial dynamics that authenticates the governing logics of exclusion/obliteration.

To better understand this dynamic, I will examine how entertainment utilizes what

Calvin Warren, author of Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation, coins catachrestic fantasies: rhetorical arguments embedded within the iconography of the archive designed to attribute pathologized meaning onto the Black body as a ontometaphysical corrective that reminds the Black being of its non-relationship to Being and “true” function as equipment in human form. The goal of catachrestic fantasies is to utilize representations of Blackness as toys that transfigure Black bodies into sites of pleasure and disgust for the white gaze. Catachrestic fantasies offer a framework that exposes how aspirations for Black representation within American popular culture presents itself as proof of racial progress over time when in actuality it functions inside the politics of the archive as another tool designed to continue the obliteration of the

Black being.24

A rhetorical intervention to the violence produces by catachrestic fantasies can be found in Saidiya Hartman’s methodology of Critical Fabulation. In Venus In Two Acts, critical fabulation is defined a speculative narrative practice that improperly reproduces, meaning the expression of Black social life the reject the edicts of white normativity, the forgotten legacies of Black gendered flesh whose lives have been systematically sanitized and manipulated by the violence of the archive. The seeming omnipresence of the archive creates a state of metaphysical instability for the free Black; emancipated Black bodies who are no longer legally recognized as equipment for Human use but are not accepted

24 Warren, Ontological Terror .

into the political community of the Human. In developing how catachrestic fantasies stress the possibilities for critical fabulation as a mode of rhetorical intervention, I will utilize affect theory to explain how catachrestic fantasies’ rhetorically impresses the abjection of Blackness produces debilitating metabolic processes inside the free Blacks embodied subjectivity, forcing them to only know Blackness within the grammars of suffering and assimilation into racialized labor divisions. Critical fabulation serves not only as a narrative practice that remembers Blackness outside of the surveillance of the archive but is also a rhetorical intervention and affective metabolic process that allows free Blacks to both reject the abjectification of the archive and understand ourselves outside of this abjection.

Literature Review

The Broken Promises of Black Representation

Drawing from Emily Owens’ Fantasies of Consent, I argue post-emancipatory civil society (re)produces a particular and erotic model of interracial exchange centered around an enticing representational politic to normalize this project. This politic seduces

Black laborers with a “language of liberation” that promises the possibility of recognizing and incorporating a “postcolonial Black working class sovereignty” into the protected community of Humanity. 25 The transmogrification of Black flesh into fungible mediums is then accumulated and super-exploited to communicate counterinsurgent discourses that

25 Franco Barchiesi, "BLACKNESS AND LABOR IN THE AFTERLIVES OF RACIAL SLAVERY," Edited by Franco Barchiesi and Shona N. Jackson ("International Labor and Working-Class History," 96) , accessed February 14, 2020, https://www.academia.edu/41059022/_BLACKNESS_AND_LABOR_IN_THE_AFTERLIVES_OF_RACIAL_SLAV ERY_edited_by_Franco_Barchiesi_and_Shona_N._Jackson_International_Labor_and_Working- Class_History_96_.

deceive Free Black people into willingly laboring as null value objects with “unfettered exchangeability and transformation.” 26 Black Representation politics should then be understood as the public consumption (or cannibalization) of individualized enactments of Black fungibility. These representations are collectivized to promote “progressive scripts” that specifically commends emancipated Black folks for the ability to “conform to the bourgeois gendered roles and family norm.” 27 These scripts are then utilized by the public to enfranchise the “institutional and psychic reproduction of the power of the entire white community over the entire Black population.” 28

This script relies upon the creation of two aesthetic systems 29 following the historical eras of emancipation and postracialism. Calvin Warren and Devyn Springer articulate how Black Representation during these eras were scripted by abject metanarratives that disguises the afterlife of slavery into humanist fantasies of democratic progress. Their analysis exposes how the Black Tragedy casts Free Blacks as both a cultural anxiety and a fetish commodity within the soc(et)ial imaginary. These aesthetic systems maintain Humanity as an exclusive and desirable enthymeme still foreclosed to

Blackness regardless of the temporal state of free/unfree. Additionally, these aesthetic systems affectively protect rigid narrative structures within cultural works that: 1) codify

Black flesh to project racially essentialized tropes that stoke the humanist imaginary and

26 King, “The Labor of (Re)Reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(Ly).” 27 Barchiesi, "BLACKNESS AND LABOR IN THE AFTERLIVES OF RACIAL SLAVERY," Edited by Franco Barchiesi and Shona N. Jackson ("International Labor and Working-Class History," 96) . 28 Barchiesi. 29 Here I am utilizing Michael MacDonald’s definition. Aesthetic systems “function as complex social systems that inform the individual and collective subjectivities of creators and participants and are informed and structured by shared ethnicities but also by a long history of racist political policy. Michael B. MacDonald, “CRITICAL PEDAGOGY OF AESTHETIC SYSTEMS,” Counterpoints 475 (2016): 125–38.

2) construct surveillance and self-surveillance apparatuses that discipline Black bodies believing the best strategy for liberation relies upon their visible proximity to Humanism.

Following the event of emancipation from slavery, the social formations established from the expropriation of American genocide and slavery were neither eradicated nor depreciated. Instead, these formations became disguised by what Warren terms as catachrestic fantasies, or representations of Black life that deploy Black flesh as

“vessels of the human’s imagination and configuration of the world.” 30 These vessels were utilized by civil society to fulfill white fantasies of total domination and promote discourses that constructs Blackness as “an undisciplined mass of sexual savages” who contaminate the community of Humanity. 31 This pathologized imaginary places Free

Blacks in “the interstice of existence” where their bodies, both in and outside of performed address, can only be rendered legible through “a performance for a white fantasy.” 32 The aesthetic codification of Blackness’ “collusive bond” as a cultural anxiety mobilize(s) an overarching surveillance apparatus where whiteness can take pleasure in culturally, extra-judiciously, and interpersonally disciplining emancipated Black people into alienated zones of nothingness. 33 Catachrestic fantasies naturalize an abjectified metanarrative which pathologizes individual and collective Black agency as a “symbolic negation” that threatens Humanity and must be dominated/obliterated through the

30 Warren, Ontological Terror . 31 Tryon P. Woods, “‘Beat It like a Cop’The Erotic Cultural Politics of Punishment in the Era of Postracialism,” Social Text 31, no. 1 (114) (March 1, 2013): 21–41, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472- 1958881. 32 Warren, Ontological Terror . 33 Mark Lawrence McPhail, “Dark Menexenus : Black Opportunism in an Age of Racial Anxiety,” Southern Communication Journal 75, no. 2 (March 31, 2010): 160–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/10417941003613255.

absolute authority of whiteness. 34 This phobic/philic metanarrative establishes a “criminal producing assemblage” within the public imaginary that deputizes white Humans with

“more-than-human” authority to perform intimate enactments of punitive violence to suppress and police Black bodies into positions of “less-than-human.” 35 Catachrestic fantasies reveal the metaphysical structure of domination inherent in Black Tragedy because it scripts Black Tragic Heroes with “the inability… to be accessed, recognized, analyzed, or incorporated by white civil society” without “obsequiousness to vicious demands” of white fantasy. 36

The historical cumulation of Black political resistance that lead to the inauguration of the first Black US president rallied cultural works to produce an additional aesthetic system that I term postraciality. 37 Postracial aesthetics use the neoliberal turn 38 to endorse racialized capitalist logics as the best governing principles for a progressive and mutually beneficial society. Postraciality manufactures a repressed public memory that frames the traumatic legacy of Black subjugation as “a useless history” that must be forgotten for Black resistance to achieve “an empowered political position capable of effective liberation politics.”39 This repressed public memory conceals the “realities of conquest, enslavement, domination, cruelty, torture,” to substantiate an alternative historical reality where the terrors of racial captivity are

34 Woods, “‘Beat It like a Cop’The Erotic Cultural Politics of Punishment in the Era of Postracialism.” 35 Ponton, “Clothed in Blue Flesh.” 36 Gillespie, “Black Dada Nihilismus: Theorizing a Radical Black Aesthetic,” Critical Ethnic Studies 4, no. 2 (n.d.): 100; Warren, Ontological Terror . 37 I define postraciality as a dominant discourse that asserts society is currently in a period of time where racial discrimination does not exist. 38 For the neoliberal turn I am using Devyn Springer’s definition “The neoliberal turn, the gradual embrace of the general idea that society (and every institution within it) works best when it works according to the principles of the market, can go part of the way.” 39 Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (NYU Press, 2010).

recovered through the presencing of Black faces in visible propinquity to social, political, economic, and imperialistic conventions of civil society. 40 The neoliberal turn disseminates representations of Black life to employ Free Blacks as “mediums” to communicate counterinsurgent discourses that assert “ultimate engagement” with system of Western imperialism as a civic good for Black people. 41 Postracial aesthetics’ discursive shift from deployed vessels to employed mediums animates the rhetorical seduction discussed earlier by entrapping the symbolic proximation of Blackness as valuable opportunities for “shifting structures of domination away from their current sedimentation.” 42 Additionally, postracial aesthetics expose Free Blacks’ complicity in racial domination through the deployment of racially essentialized rhetorical tropes which dictates “which voices and spirits are silenced and broken in the name of unity. [emphasis mine]” 43 Postraciality’s conflation of amplified civic engagement with effective Black liberation sustains the anti-Black metanarrative by celebrating counterinsurgent practices of bourgeoisie respectability and cisnormativity as the appropriate liberation strategy for the Free Black. The postracial rhetorical tropes of Black Unity, The Struggle, and Black

Excellence erect a panoptic apparatus of Black self-surveillance that disciplines Black people into only desiring what “affirms the opportunism” of postracial Black Re-

Presentation. 44 Springer elaborates on how this apparatus generates a superficial radical

Black politic that sustains the anti-Black structure of civil society:

40 Scott. 41 “Neoliberal Economics, Capitalist Crises, and the ‘Representation Economy’ | Devyn Springer on Patreon,” accessed February 7, 2020, https://www.patreon.com/posts/neoliberal-and-26149208. 42 Gillespie, “Black Dada Nihilismus.” 43 McPhail, “Dark Menexenus .” 44 McPhail.

Representation then, in my view, as it is now commonly referred to and meant in its liberal languaging, is a co-opted means of replicating Black (or marginalized) faces in capitalist places, to procure neoliberalism, through advocating for heightened engagement in the capitalist market/structure. We give money to the exploitative, oppressive corporations because they have a Black family in their commercials, despite how they actually treat their workers or Black employees. We fiscally and socially support movies with Black actors, even if they're dripping with U.S. military propaganda, because of representation, and because this means we too could be there one day. 45

As aesthetic systems, catachrestic fantasies and post raciality cooperate to establish a

“legacy of intimate violence.” 46 Catachrestic fantasies project a terrifying nothingness onto Black flesh that maintains the gratuitously violent interpersonal dynamics of white mastery over Black enslavement. Postraciality seduces Black bodies into believing that compliance with structures of anti-Blackness are liberatory opportunities for incorporation into Humanity to suppress revolutionary resistance. 47

The aesthetic systems of postraciality and catachrestic fantasies unveil how Black

Re-Presentation is used as an onto-epistemological tool that fosters a specialized narrative structure that maintains the powered dynamic of (White) Human over (Black)

Object. This narrative structure proliferates enthymemic interpretations of Black flesh as anxiety/fetish to coerce consensual submission for the promise of incorporation to

Humanity as a desired and ritualistic social practice for Free Blacks. This Black Tragic narrative engenders the afterlife of slavery by manipulating the erotic, the personal and political construction of desire/pleasure, to formulate desire and derive pleasure from the seductive politics of representation. In addition, this narrative structure represses how

45 “Neoliberal Economics, Capitalist Crises, and the ‘Representation Economy’ | Devyn Springer on Patreon.” 46 Woods, “‘Beat It like a Cop’The Erotic Cultural Politics of Punishment in the Era of Postracialism.” 47 Woods.

Black flesh is routinely atomized and consumed to sustain the erotic formation of

Humanity. 48 Through the lens of Tragedy, I explore how Free Blacks’ inhabitance within cultural works throughout American history results in an abject narrative structure that traps Black people within a violent cycle of struggling to claim Humanity that does not exist.

The Archive Deformation of Black Life

The archive is normatively understood as an accumulation of historical records that helps provide objective information on a group of people, institutions, and societies.

However, the archive employs rhetorical strategies to limit the practice of remembering and telling the stories of Blackness to events that capture the rhetoric of the intimate.

White slave owners like Jefferson were able to solidify his complete authority over his enslaved family through their documented interactions. The archive collects moments that capture the rhetoric of the intimate, rhetorical artifacts that capture the anti-Black dynamics between disparate bodies. The rhetoric of the intimate produces the rhetoric of the public, discourse which justifies the logic of anti-Blackness. The rhetoric of the public exists as an anti-Blackness producing assemblage which uses the assumed objectivity of the archive as prove of Blackness’ “natural” abjection. As the Middle

Passage amassed communication from slave ships, their manipulated account of events served as uncontested truth which divorced the African Human from the Black Slave.

In “The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved”,

Stephanie E. Smallwood reflects on the written correspondence of slave ship companies

48 Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham, UNITED STATES: Duke University Press, 2012), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=1173297.

to examine the archive as a corrupted site of knowledge production. Smallwood notes that the archive is not an objective collection of historical knowledge but instead an anti-

Black assemblage that justifies the logics of slavery by analyzing reports from the

English Royal African Company’s London headquarters given by ship officials who were overtaken by seventeen slaves. The slaves’ rebellion created an “unaccountable” event that challenged the dynamics of power, so the archive cleanses history of that event to protect and maintain the anti-Black dynamics establish during the Middle Passage. 49

Smallwood argues that the slavery archive establishes a regime of power through counterfactual logic. This logic was deployed through and documented within the archive to naturalize the ship’s dynamics of racial violence which laid the foundation for the current structure of power in the US.

Laren F. Klein investigates slaves’ presence within archive in, “The Image of

Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings” , further investigates the slaves’ presence within the archive to confront the simultaneous “deformation” of

Black life and sanitation of white mastery that occurred through the strategic inclusion and exclusion of Blackness within the archive. While the archive is assumed to be a

“neutral depository of knowledge,” it actually serves an epistemological tool meant to preserve the metaphysical values stemming from the legacy of chattel slavery and colonialization.50 Klein focuses on uncovering the emancipation agreement between

James Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson to visualize how white subjecthood and Black objecthood are established through the rhetorical act of documentation. Jefferson’s

49 Stephanie E. Smallwood, “The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved.” 50 Lauren F. Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings,” American Literature 85, no. 4 (December 1, 2013): 661–88, https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2367310.

promise to Hemmings not only re-constructs Jefferson to be remembered as a benevolent master, it also institutes the “incontrovertible authority” of Jefferson’s mastery, as

Hemming’s emancipation is preconditioned by Jefferson’s written consent. That precondition solidifies the written records of the archive in order to standardize white mastery and dictate the fungible nature of Black bodies.

Blackness’ Visuality Within the Archive

In slavery, Black bodies occupied the immutable position of “equipment in human form,” meaning their existence was demarcated only by their abject objectification.

Emancipation, then, can be understood as an event that destabilizes Blackness’ positioning from fixed to malleable. This malleability is pathologized and surveilled by civil society, as Black chattel labor is required for its continuation. Following emancipation, Black bodies became an ontic distortion that threatened the anti-Black social order, so whiteness began using the rhetorical strategies contained with the iconography of the archive to pathologize Black bodies for their distortion. To reinforce the abjectification of Black bodies, white weaponized the archive as an epistemology tool that produced both documented violence and representational violence as well.

In the fourth chapter of his book Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and

Emancipation , Calvin L. Warren provides a philosophical intervention into Heideggarian metaphysics to argue that slavery divorced the African slave from the Human and inaugurated Blackness to exist within civil society as a nothingness which both destabilizes and undergirds the metaphysical social order. In “Catachrestic Fantasies,”

Warren focuses on the relationship between “Black visuality and violence” through the

theory catachrestic fantasies— the use of Black representation within entertainment which is designed to remind the Black being of its nonrelationship to Being and emphasize its function as equipment in human form. This representational mastery then undergirds the “phenomenological and ontological order” that legitimizes and sustains civil society.51 For the purpose of this project, Warren’s concept of catachrestic fantasies will operate as a framing device that critically examines the anti-Black rhetorical argument encoded within Black representation in American pop culture. Catachrestic fantasies explain the rhetorical violence encoded within the inclusion of Black bodies in globalized media that has endured since colonization and slavery. Warren’s analysis of political cartoons demonstrates the potential to discuss how rhetorical argument are imbued within this Blackness, representation, and entertainment to construct the metaphysical order.

Patricia Hill Collins furthers Warren’s theory in her examination of Black women’s representation within the Western imaginary in the fourth chapter of her renowned book, Black Feminist Thought. Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of

Empowerment , Collins argues that within the anti-Black system of representation, Black women are flattened into specific tropes designed to represent Black women as the ultimate deviant “Other” in opposition to the dominant white society. Collins utilizes objectification theory in order to argue that Black womanhood is viewed as an object designed to be exploited and manipulated. These constructed representations of Black womanhood maintained Black women’s subordination by stigmatizing emancipated

Black women to justify the state violence designed to curtail the assumed freedoms of the

51 Warren, Ontological Terror .

free Black. This total objectification of Black women produces an unstable relationship of white masculine domination and Black feminine subordination, as “the foundations of intersecting oppressions become grounded in interdependent concepts of binary thinking, oppositional difference, objectification, and social hierarchy.” 52

The Erotic Pathologization of Black Femme Excess

The white imaginary projects a paradoxical abhorrence and desire upon Black bodies as Blackness is forced to be the signifier of nothingness that whiteness desires to simultaneously eradicate and dominate. Black representation within the archive is then regulated by whiteness’ anti-Black desires as a rhetorical strategy that sutures the signified nothingness of the Black body, specifically Black assigned-female-at-birth

(AFAB) bodies, to an illicit sexual excess that is both pathologized and fetishized. The conflation of Blackness and hypersexuality is then used as a justification for whiteness to enact racial, sexual, and gendered violence upon Black bodies, as collections of Black genitalia in Western medical journals was used to corroborate the criminal deviancy of

Black people and justify the continuation of white mastery. The relentless nature of the archive’s representational violence results in Black cultural institutions developing the rhetorical counter-tactic of self-disciplining through respectability politics. Black church organizations begin promoting the self-criminalization and self-surveillance of Black sexuality as an attempt to defends against the continuous racialized sexual violence or

Black representation made by Black creators. Likewise, Black Panther contain message that discourages acts of gratuitous freedom though the narrative valuing and devaluing of

52 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (London, UNITED STATES: Taylor & Francis Group, 2002), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=178421.

its characters. Both serve as examples which demonstrates Blackness’ attempt to develop counter tactic against the messaging of the archive. This self-disciplining not only fails as a rhetorical counter tactic but stunts Black expression’s ability to construct a counter imaginary that radically self loves the Black body for its excess.

In “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in

Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature” Sander L. Gilman examines the conventions present within iconography of Blackness in the archive to explore how controlling images also act as ontological creations that ascribe an illicit sexual excess onto the essence of Black gendered bodies, particularly Black AFAB bodies. Gilman’s study concentrates on how the iconography of the Hottenot figure and the prostitute were combined during the 19 th century to suture the Black afab body to an overt, hypersexual excess. The excess ascribed on the iconography of Black womanhood was then juxtaposed with the iconography of white womanhood to forward anti-Black gendered differences where Blackness illicit sexual excess became a toy meant to fulfill whiteness’ covert sexual lack. The hyper-sexualization of Black women through iconography began an underlying discourse that stresses the physiology and physiognomy of Black women as proof that Black bodies are inherently sexually deviant and excessive in comparison to their white counterparts.

Melanie C. Jones elucidates on how this hyper sexualization impacts Black expression in “The Will to Adorn: Beyond Self Surveillance, Towards a Womanist Ethic of Redemptive Self-Love.” Jones studies the historical accounts of twentieth century

Black communities to reveal that Western iconography of Black women generates an obsession-possession duplexity that visualizes the Black female body as both a machine

meant to sustain the Western social order via labor and an object designed to satisfy the sexually violent obsession of the modern world. Jones argues that whiteness’ obsession- possession paradigm erects an overarching surveillance apparatus based on the erotic desires of the heteropatriarchal white supremist gaze that simultaneously fetishizes and criminalizes Blackness for its sexual excess. Whiteness then attempts to dominate and

“correct” that excess through institutionalized racial and sexual abuse, the prison- industrial complex is the most prominent example.

Using W.E.B Dubois’ theory of double-consciousness, Jones asserts that Black bodies began to self-surveil and develop cultural institutions like the church to employ rhetorical counter-tactics that self-disciplined Black bodies to assimilate into the racialized affective labor of respectability politics in effort to conceal their excess and therefore not be criminalized. Jones, however, aptly points out that self-disciplining fails as a rhetorical counter-tactic, as respectability does not shield Black bodies from the possibility of gratuitous violence. What the practice of self-disciplining does do is weaken Black expression’s “will to adorn,” which can be understood as an affective form of care created when Black bodies lovingly exist as themselves. The will to adorn is crucial for the Black body to generate a counter imaginary that activated the excess of the

Black body. This promotes a body politic of redemptive self-love that reconsiders

Blackness’ “bodies, pleasures, and adornments as tastes, thrills, and turn-ons for the self rather than onlookers.” 53 The distinction between self-surveillance and the will to adorn will be indispensable when I explore the phenomena of Black representation made by

53 Melanie C. Jones, “The Will to Adorn: Beyond Self-Surveillance, Toward a Womanist Ethic of Redemptive Self-Love,” Black Theology 16, no. 3 (July 11, 2018): 218–30, https://doi.org/10.1080/14769948.2018.1492303.

Black creators. Black created representation still possesses the potential to be a catachrestic fantasy as it may promote the self-surveillance of Blackness. However, the will to adorn demonstrates the affective potential of critical fabulation to express forms of communal care for Blackness.

The Archive’s Affective Eroding of Black Love

Affective labor extends beyond just the commercial work of generating affect, a performed feeling meant to influence behavior. Blackness is expected to create an affective performance of respectability for the comfortability of whiteness. Additionally,

Blackness must complete the task of internalizing affective excess while maintaining a respectable affective display. As a result, Black people must constantly produce a racialized affective labor, emotional labor that interpellates disparate bodies into particular labor/social positions within the metaphysical hierarchy. Theorizing affective as a byproductive model of production, meaning excess production are absorb rather than destroyed within the embodied subjectivity of Blackness. Byproductive model of affective labor is critical to capturing how hierarches of power exploit racialized and gendered labor to establish marginalized forms of subjectivity and depleted agency as byproducts themselves. Racism is identified as particularly violent affect that plagues racialized bodies who are forced to undertake the affective labor of internalizing racially violent affect while simultaneously displaying a respectable affect. This racialized affective labor conditions racialized bodies into assimilationist labor positions which fortify the hierarchy of power and drain the agency of marginalized bodies. Counter affective metabolic models, alternative affective channels meant to assisted Black bodies in healthily processing the indigestibility of anti-Blackness, are critically needed to

counter the affective excess of antiBlackness and engage in alternative knowledge production that radically challenges the injustices of the social order.

Shiloh Whitney develops the byproductive model of affective labor to explain that racialized affective labor falls outside of the binary of productive-reproductive. Whitney recognizes the performances of emotions are “both a means of production and a byproduct of the work.”54 Racialized affective labor demands a distinct type of emotional labor that produces a pleasurable 'state of mind' for nonBlack recipients while Blackness is left to manage the emotional and affectual byproducts embedded in their internal emotions.55 These byproducts are then left to be processed by the embodied subjectivity of Blackness, which gaslights us into believing in the abjection of Blackness and assimilate into white norms. Whitney argues the commercialization of affective performances reveals the “colonization of the private life by public industry,” as affective labor operates as a kind of immaterial labor that is informed by the biopolitical reorganization of political economy around production of subjectivities which tracks the traditional racial and sexual division of labor originating from plantation politics. Black representation is implicated within this commercialization as the presentation of

Blackness in American popular culture transfigures the Black body into an affective object that forced to perform affects is designed to fulfill the violent desires of whiteness.

Catachrestic fantasies demand from Black representation a racialized affective labor that

54 Shiloh Whitney, “Affective Intentionality and Affective Injustice: Merleau-Ponty and Fanon on the Body Schema as a Theory of Affect,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 56, no. 4 (2018): 488–515, https://doi.org/10.1111/sjp.12307. 55 Shiloh Whitney, “Byproductive Labor: A Feminist Theory of Affective Labor beyond the Productive– Reproductive Distinction,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 44, no. 6 (July 2018): 637–60, https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453717741934.

promotes anti-Black rhetorical arguments for the mass consumption of civil society and leaves Blackness to deal with the mephitic affective byproducts of this labor.

In “Affective Indigestion: Lorde, Fanon, and Gutierrez-Rodriguez on Race and

Affective Labor,” Whitney expands our understanding of the debilitating effects of racialized affective labor by examining the affective labor performed by racialized migrant domestic workers. Whitney’s analysis reveals that while the normative production of affective labor adheres to the model of metabolic processes that absorb and release affective byproducts. However, the by-products created through the production of racialized affective labor are especially arduous to release because of the exploitative nature of the labor. Whitney defines this inability to expel racialized affective byproducts as affective indigestion. Whitney refers to Audre Lorde’s work on racism and anger to highlight how anti-Blackness itself exists as an affective dimension that racialized bodies are forced to constantly absorb through the archive. The archive constant promotion of the abjection of Blackness produces and indigestible affect inside the subjectivity of Black bodies. Lorde and Fanon explain the indigestibility of antiBlackness creates a form of rage that is incommunicable to nonBlack people and tetanizes Blackness ability to care for itself. The affective indigestion of anti-Blackness increases the necessity of counter affective metabolic models like critical fabulation to provide Blackness a way to healthily process this representational violence

Demonstrating the deleterious effects of racialized affect labor on Black subjectivity, Andrea N Baldwin and Raven Johnson write about their experiences at a

Predominately White Institution in “Black Women’s Co-Mentoring Relationships as

Resistance to Marginalization at PWI”. While the authors do not explicitly make theoretical connection to affective labor, their analysis of concepts like microaggressions and racial battle fatigue reflect the affective racial violence and indigestion discussed by

Whitney. Baldwin and Johnson recall instances in their academic career to expose the

Eurocentric foundations of the academy, and the globalized world at large, that cause the academy to adopt an antagonistic relationship with Black women. This antagonistic relationship exemplifies how racialized affective labor creates indigestible affective byproducts, otherwise known as microaggressions. Black women are then forced to absorb and internalize these by-products until they are properly assimilated into the academy.

The metabolic process Black women are forced to undergo while attending anti-Black institutions lead to a particular form of affective indigestion known as racial battle fatigue, where racialized bodies experience psychological exhaustion that deters them from continuing their challenge to racial injustice. Baldwin and Johnson, however, also discuss the relationship they formed to promote the connection Black women form as an alternative metabolic model. This alternative model consists of Black women adopting an egalitarian mentorship relationship with each other which produces a mutually empowering affect. When the counter affect is metabolized, it enacts a process of oppositional Knowledge production that destabilizes the dynamics of power created by the anti-Black iconography of Black women.

Critical Fabulation as a Method for Inheriting Traumatic Memory

The anti-Black iconography of Black women circulated by the Western world through the archive establishes a totalizing intergenerational narrative where Black

bodies can only signify their legacy through a history of abject violence. This narrative trap and forces Black people into rigid heterocisnormative categories of gender where

“Black female flesh” can only be registered/signified as receptacles of anti-Black heterocissexist sexual violence. Black people are forced to inherit damaging conceptions of Black gender and sexuality that refigures them to become heterocissexist biological tools. Black AFAB in particular, have to adopt an unsustainable Mother-Daughter speculative imagination that create psychological debilitation and sexual alienation from quare pleasures and desires. Critical fabulation exists as a counter speculative imagination that attempts a rhetorical intervention that reimagines the lived experiences of Black bodies absented by the archive to construct counter rhetorical arguments that challenges the violence of the archive.

Stephanie Li in “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora” argues that the demand to “overcome and commemorate” the traumatic history of the archive often leaves Black femmes struggling to achieve such goals without becoming overdetermined by the violence endured and passing unresolved trauma onto future generations. Li analyzes the strategies of resistances posed by Corregidora women, a family of Black women born through slavery and incest who rely on biological reproduction of the next generation to corroborate their history of abuse absent documented evidence. The older generation of Corregidora women isolate the younger generation by transferring their traumatic memory into narrative language through female reproduction as a counter tactic against the archive. The Corregidora women’s counter tactic attempts to produce a new understanding of their unique identities and “radically

shifting the terms of her foremother’s injunction.”56 This counter tactic fails, however, as the traumas of slavery overdetermine Blackness’ ability to see itself outside of abjection and destroys the possibility of Black love. Li’s examination of the use of narrative as an alternative model for commemorating the experiences of Black femme echos Hartman’s argument for critical fabulation as a form of narrative reclamation which Black femmes can utilize to process the traumatic memory of slavery and its after life without becoming overdetermined by the trauma.

Saidiya Hartman develops the concept of critical fabulation in “Venus in Two

Acts” which attempts to recover the existence of “two captive girls” murdered not only by their captors but by the legacy of the archive. Hartman argues that within Eurocentric epistemology, Black femmes are only recognized and remembered through the state- sanctioned trauma they have endured; trauma which then becomes the foundation of their objecthood. Hartman questions if the stories suppressed by the archive can ever be retold without recreating the conditions of violence that caused their erasure in the first place.

Critical fabulation is then forwarded as a new methodology meant to “expose and exploit the incommensurability between the experience of the enslaved and the fictions of history” and jeopardize the status of the event to re-imagine a counter history that is situated within zones of social and corporal death. 57 This thesis explores how critical fabulation serves as a mode of rhetorical invention that can provide both a counter affective metabolic model and alternative epistemological tool that adorns Blackness in a self-love that rejects the representational violence of the archive and catachrestic fantasies.

56 Stephanie Li, “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s ‘Corregidora,’” Callaloo 29, no. 1 (2006): 131–50. 57 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” June 1, 2008.

Methodology

How can Black bodies cope with ubiquitous messaging of the archive? Hartman grapples with this question by inventing the methodology of Critical Fabulation, a narrative practice which rearranges the events documented by the archive from Blackness’ contested point of view. Critical Fabulation’s attempt to “jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done” should not be observed simply as a historical intervention which contests the archive’s rhetorical account, but also must also be analyzed as a rhetorical intervention that launches arguments that counter the signification of the archive. 58 The intervention does not attempt to repair the damaged caused by the archive, but instead endeavors to view “past the crack” to produce an radical Black imaginary that sees beyond the world of globalized anti-

Blackness and envisions the potential for a new order and space for Blackness. 59

What I want to explore within my thesis is critical fabulation’s ability to uncover the praxis of furtive communication, the clandestine interpersonal communication between Black bodies, particularly when under duress from sites of weaponized anti-

Blackness (i.e prisons, schools, state buildings, laws etc). Furtive communication serves as survivalist and even revolutionary tool for Black gendered bodies in the face of continued anti-Black state violence. Furtive communication produces a counter metabolic affective model which helps Black people digest the affective violence of anti-Blackness and gain the spiritual energy needed to disrupt civil society. Critical fabulation creates a

58 Hartman. 59 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study,” n.d., 174.

rich counter archive containing multitudes of speculative works that depict key themes for the practices of furtive communication. My discussion will concentrate on the radical potential of furtive communication, a rhetorical counter tactic that creates forms of affective metabolization that assists Black bodies in the development of practices of self- care and revolutionary community building. Throughout my thesis I will analyze the diverse cultural works of Black artists as practices of critical fabulation that act as rhetorical interventions that navigate the structural antagonisms and “status criminality” imposed upon Black women across time and reveal the revolutionary potential of furtive communication. 60 These speculative narratives re-arrange the recorded historical violence of the archive and re-presents them in order to “make visible the production of disposable lives to describe “the resistance of the object.” 61 The practice of reimagining the Black social life challenges the Western Canon of the archive which relegates the genealogy of

Black feminist epistemology into zones of death. My thesis will compare these narratives to demonstrate the ontological violence of the archive then use the process of critical fabulation to explain the radical potential of telling stories of Black life in events of social death.

Thesis Outline

My first chapter will continue my interrogation of the broken promises of Black

Representation by analyzing three speculative fiction texts which explore Black characters’ cruelly optimistic struggle to claim their Humanity during various post- emancipatory American eras. The 1999 musical Marie Christine , a retelling of the Greek

60 Hartman, “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner.” 61 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” June 1, 2008.

tragedy Madea reset in Progressive-Era America, will act as a framing narrative device of

Black Tragedy which displays the monstrous intimacies motivating Black beings to hopelessly aspire towards the unfulfilled promise of Black Re-Presentation. I will use this framing device to reread Ralph Ellison’s iconic 1952 novel Invisible Man, a critical introspection of Black Life during the Great Migration, and the sixth episode of

Watchmen , a 2019 HBO superhero series that remixes an alternative history of

Segregated and Postracial America that tests the limits of Blackness’ ability to become

Human, entitled “This Extraordinary Being.” I utilize these works to explain the structure of desire and pleasure felt when these protagonists, Marie Christine, The Narrator, and

Will Reeves, act as large-than-life versions of Free Blacks who fantastically struggle to re-present themselves from the null objecthood of chattel slavery into valued subjecthood of Humanity.

My second chapter will express the intergenerational existential instability that occurs when Black people only know themselves through the anti-Black grammar of civil society. This chapter complicates the archive as a site of oppositional resistance, by analyzing author Gayle Jones’ and filmmaker Cheryl Dunye’s narrative critique of the tragic promises of the archive in their germinal works Corregidora and The Watermelon

Woman . Through my rhetorical analysis of Jones’ exploration of the traumatic heritage of the Corregidora women, I contend that bio-reproductive storytelling results in the tragic self-erosion of Black personhood, the heteronormative (re)production of intragenerational and intracommunal violence. I will then use Duyne’s creation of her own imagined archive to reconsider critical fabulation, a narrative practice which rearranges the events documented by the archive from Blackness’ contested point of view, as an alternative

archival strategy which gestures towards the cataclysmic practice of what I term as Black guerilla expressionism. Black guerilla expressionism is a counter-archival practice that combats “the racialization of the human” while also imagining “unruly yet generative conceptions of being” for Black people. 62

In my third chapter I will evaluate Saidiya Hartman’s methodology of critical fabulation, as a rhetorical invention which challenges the discourse stemming from the archive and allows for Black bodies to engage in rhetorical counter tactics that helps them signify themselves as something else. 63 I will be focusing on three artifacts: Janelle

Monae’s emotion picture, Dirty Computer, a dystopian science fiction short film that follows Cindi Mayweather as she is imprisoned by an unnamed state entity and force to undergo conversion therapy-like process of Cleaning; afro pessimist Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation of Esther Brown a queer Black women from the turn of the century who was also wrongfully detained and tortured; and lastly my own critical fabulation of my experiences working at a predominately white institution last year. These fabulations act as rhetorical intervention that navigates the structural antagonisms and “status criminality” imposed upon Black women across time, while revealing furtive communication’s revolutionary potential. I compare the critical fabulations of Esther

Brown, Cindi Mayweather, and my own history to reveal how the archive speaks

Blackness into abjection and how Blackness communicates within this struggle.

Specifically, I focus on the counter tactic of furtive communication, the clandestine

62 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an AntiBlack World (NYU Press, 2020). 63 “Hartman 2008 Venus in Two Acts.Pdf,” n.d.

interpersonal intimate exchange between Black bodies while under the duress of anti-

Black violence, for its radical affective potential.

It Ends Tragically: Navigating the Seductive Politics of Black Re-Presentation

Normally people are not radical, normally people are not moving against the system: normally people are just trying to live, to have a bit of romance and to feed their kids. And what people want is to be recognized, to be incorporated."

-Frank Wilderson III

“The problem of colonization, therefore, compromises not only the intersection of historical and objective conditions but also man’s attitude toward these conditions”

-Franz Fanon

Aspiration for progressive Black representation within the current cultural productions is an attempt to negotiate “the limitations of the representational possibilities” to create an image of Black existence that corrects for the historical positioning of Black flesh as property plus. 64 This image is meant to symbolically liberate the category of

Blackness from the metaphysical void of nothingness and constitute emancipated Black bodies into the world of the Human subjectivity. The issue with utilizing Representation as a liberatory praxis is that it assumes the negotiation for the re-presentation of

Blackness within the cultural “dramatics of value” is one that could ever be progressive, consensual, or egalitarian. 65 It ignores the ways that Representation, like the Law, was

64 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London, UNITED KINGDOM: Routledge, 2003), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=179272. 65 Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U. S. Antagonisms (North Carolina, UNITED STATES: Duke University Press, 2010), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=1170634.

never designed to incorporate or recognized the existence a possible Black Human.

Instead, Representation was created by cultural institutions of whiteness to proliferate an abjectfied Black being that naturalizes and secures the privatized, propertying relationality of colonial chattel slavery. Black liberals’ push for synergistic visibility in exchange for the promise of Humanity forgets how the rhetoric of the intimate archives that synergy to maintain the plantation dynamics of Human (White Person) over the

NonHuman (Black Object). This rhetoric rewrites these interracial exchanges to satisfy whiteness’ cannibalistic attachment to Black flesh.

Black theorists Frank Wilderson, Calvin Warren, David Marriott, Saidiya

Hartman and Vincent Woodard’s analysis of white fantasy and consumption explain that

Black Re-Presentation can neither negotiate nor incorporate Blackness into Humanity.

They argue against this (im)possibility because the white fantasy requires Black flesh be relegated to nonautonomous “objects of play” whose null value (or nothingness) is made enterprise by Humanity to preserve whiteness’ sovereignty and Blackness’ fungibility. 66

Black representation should then be understood not as a negotiation but a continuation of the wanton sale of Black flesh which excludes/obliterates any possibility of a Black

Human. This exclusion/obliteration is accomplished through the rhetorical seduction of white promises which entices Black people with commerce of manumission-as- advancement, which is assumed to be a line of flight away from objecthood to Human subjectivity. This chapter will continue the theorization of the sexual and racial violence that is produced by the white imaginary, supported by the tradition of incredible work that the scholars above me have produced.

66 Warren, Ontological Terror .

My chapter explores on the Black tragedy buried underneath this white fantasy.

Which is to say, I focus on the Black psyches’ intense desire for the currency of manumission-as-advancement, otherwise known as claiming their humanity, despite the continuous abject failure that occurs when Black people attempt to ratify this promise.

The Aristotelian model of tragedy is an important narrative model for examining the Free

Black’s aspiration for progressive Representation as it exposes two things: 1) How Black

Re-Presentation’s follows a tragic narrative structure that construct speculative frames of emancipated Black beings failing to access Humanity due to an “erring waywardness that brings disaster” and returns them to the position of bounded nothingness. 67 2) How

Black desires’ for Humanity are implicated within the rhetoric of the intimate which affectively condition Black bodies into believing that the fulfillment of white pleasure can result in their status advancement when in actuality it sustains their superexploitation. 68

I will analyze three speculative fiction texts which explore Black characters’ cruelly optimistic struggle to claim their Humanity during various post-emancipatory

American eras. The 1999 musical Marie Christine , a retelling of the Greek tragedy

Madea reset in Progressive-Era America, will act as a framing narrative device of Black

Tragedy which displays the monstrous intimacies motivating Black beings to hopelessly aspire towards the unfulfilled promise of Black Re-Presentation. I will use this framing device to reread Ralph Ellison’s iconic 1952 novel Invisible Man, a critical introspection of Black Life during the Great Migration, and the sixth episode of Watchmen , a 2019

67 Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy,” Midwest Studies In Philosophy 16, no. 1 (1991): 53–72, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4975.1991.tb00230.x. 68 Rorty.

HBO superhero series that remixes an alternative history of Segregated and Postracial

America that tests the limits of Blackness’ ability to become Human, entitled “This

Extraordinary Being.” I utilize these works to explain the structure of desire and pleasure felt when these protagonists, Marie Christine, The Narrator, and Will Reeves, act as large-than-life versions of Free Blacks who fantastically struggle to re-present themselves from the null objecthood of chattel slavery into valued subjecthood of Humanity. The

Aristotelian model of Tragedy allows us to access the ways postracial and post- emancipatory cultural productions transmogrify these characters into Black Tragic

Heroes, imperfect protagonists who are prefigured by the fixed fate of anti-Blackness who find themselves seduced by the rhetorical promises of Freedom, Justice, and Uplift.

These heroes are then punitively checked by their nemesis (globalized antiBlackness) for their hubris (ratifying the promise) resulting in their continual peripeteia, or downfall.

The Black tragedy of Will Reeves, the Narrator and Marie Christine demonstrate how

Blackness’ positionality within postracial cultural productions is over determined by niggativity, the representational practice of exchanging null value of Black affect for whiteness’ false promise of restored being (i.e. freedom)

“What Will You Give” The Rhetorical Seduction of the White Promises

Marie Christine resets the Greek tragedy of Medea 69 in 19 th century America to have its audience ‘bear witness’ to the tragic fate of its titular protagonist, Marie

Christine. A chorus of imprisoned Black women introduce Marie as they probe her about

69 Medea is an ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides. The plot centers on the actions of Medea, a former princess of the "barbarian" kingdom of Colchis, and the wife of Jason; she finds her position in the Greek world threatened as Jason leaves her for a Greek princess of Corinth. Medea takes vengeance on Jason by murdering Jason's new wife as well as her own children (two sons), after which she escapes to Athens to start a new life.

her impending, extra-judicial death sentence and volunteer themselves as impartial witnesses to her story. Throughout a series of flashbacks, Marie falls hopelessly and passionately in love with roguish sea captain, Dante Keyes, as she murders her own half- brother for him and flees with him from New Orleans to Chicago. Marie’s mother, voodoo priestess Mamzell’ Marie, provides Marie with a prophetic warning about the self-destructive dangers of such a love. Mamzell’ Marie recounts her relationship with

Marie’s plantation-owning white father, who selected Mamzell’ to be his mistress, to counsel Marie on the costs of her desires.

“Will you fall under the spell of another, Marie.

Once you fall under the spell of another You will lose yourself As I lost myself I lost myself to love, Marie”

During the second act of the musical, Mamzell’ Marie’s prophecy unfolds as

Dante manipulates and exploits Marie’s love and magic to accumulate sons, financial means, and political status until Marie’s Blackness becomes a hinderance to Dante’s campaign for Mayor. To gain the favor of Chicago’s white political boss Charles Gates,

Dante denies his relationship to Marie, proposes to Gates’ white daughter and intends to assimilate his biracial children into Gate’s family. After Dante forsakes his affair with

Maire, brothel madam Magdalena offers to secure Marie safe passage away from

Chicago and eventually return her son to her in exchange for a spell that will help

Magdalena conceive. Unable to leave her children or Dante, Marie becomes fiercely bounded by her passionate rage towards Dante and enacts her revenge by magically burning Gates’ daughter alive and personally euthanizing her sons. Magdalena runs away

horrified, abandoning her fertility spell while Dante initially furiously confronts Marie then despairs when he discovered his dead sons. Marie, resigned to her fate, walks into the bright dawn to meet her executioner while the chorus of jailed women echo Mamzell’

Marie’s earlier warnings to mourn the death of innocence. “Innocence Dies, By Your

Hand. For you Arrogance, for you awful love. But is love too small a pain for a Woman?

Cover your eyes and ask the sun.”

Marie’s folliculous desires and unruly passions subsist in an unthinkable and inhuman register of thought which results in the musical failing to recreate “the mesmerizing power that the Greek original can exert” for cultural critics of the production. 70 Broadway critic Charles Isherwood reviewed Marie Christine’s original

Broadway production and condemned the musical for its “frustratingly opaque” protagonist. 71 Isherwood characterizes Marie as an unsympathetic lead whose tragic fate is unfathomable and incommunicable to the audience. According to Isherwood, there is no “vortex of feeling” that explains Marie’s unhappiness with what he observes as a privileged upbringing, an unrewarding devotion to Dante, and a terrifically violent reaction to Dante’s abandonment. 72 Isherwood’s critique showcases how Free Black people’s desires and pleasures within a postracial neoliberal world cannot simply be understood within the normative forum and form of postmodern cultural criticism.

The canon of cultural criticism has been thoroughly investigated for the way it insufficiently evaluates Black cultural works. This insufficiency stems from how cultural

70 Charles Isherwood and Charles Isherwood, “Marie Christine,” Variety (blog), December 3, 1999, https://variety.com/1999/legit/reviews/marie-christine-1200460102/. 71 Isherwood and Isherwood. 72 Isherwood and Isherwood.

productions are historically entrenched within a Western cultural hegemony that assigns a scale of value that celebrates/denigrates representations of Blackness. The scale of value accredits Black Representations based on their ability to devotedly affirm the co- constitutive grammars of alienation and exploitation as meaningful contributions to the polis of Humanity. 73 Black characters like Marie Christine are routinely discarded as a

‘bad’ modern representation of ‘liberated’ Black people due to her lack of racial innocence (her murder of an innocent white woman) and her obstinate refusal to obey her white counterpart (her decision to not leave upon Gates’ request). Even critical cultural studies are ill-equipped to reckon with Black characters like Marie because its materialist focus still operates within a restrictive “modality of hegemony.” 74 Critical cultural study

(mis)recognizes how white supremacy in addition to material base shunts Blackness into an antagonistic identity formation that is not simply malcontent worker but Anti-

Human. 75 This (mis)recognition then “structures of Western man as universal, even as they write against it” by enforcing a scale of (political) value that marks Black cultural works as articulate/inarticulate. Shifting to a scale of (political) value then bases its endorsement/rejection of Black Representations on Black bodies’ aptitude to mimetically recreate universally coherent positions (Man, Worker, Citizen) as effective interest- convergent 76 strategies. Marie cannot be registered as a coherent Representation within

73 I am using Humanity to refer to Weheliye’s study of the universal category of Human as “overrepresented as white, male, heterosexual, cis-gender, able-bodied, and middle-class”“Whither the ‘Human’?” 74 Frank Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?,” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (June 2003): 225–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/1350463032000101579. 75 The Anti-Human refers to Blackess’ ontological place in the world as an object-position “against which Humanity establishes, maintains and renews its appearance” Wilderson, Red, White and Black . 76 Here I am referring to critical race scholar’s Derrick Bell’s definition of interest-convergence as a political strategy that argues civil rights victories can only be legitimately achieved through the mutual interest of white and Black populations Derrick A. Jr Bell, “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest- Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93 (1980 1979): 518.

this scale of (political) value because it cannot account for her moments of interest- divergence, such as her choice to leave her materially comfortable home to sporadically run away with Dante, her refusal of Magdalena’s moderate offer of immediate refuge and eventual reunification, or her matricide. Therefore, Marie Christine is devalued as too scandalous and particular a work to efficiently communicate ‘beneficial’ subaltern epistemologies that can delineate a “socialism on the other side of crisis.” 77 Discarding cultural works like Marie Christine for not being a respectable or prolific enough presentation forecloses critical discussions of how the supposed agency of emancipated

Black people is disturbed by their unceasing fungibility. Without a reimaging of rhetorical space and artifacts, cultural criticism (critical or otherwise) cannot contend with the ways globalized anti-Blackness establishes a racialized affective economy that operates within intimate communicative exchanges to seduce Black people, like Marie, into ‘consenting’ to the (re)production of their fungibility.

Dante’s pursuit of Marie demonstrates how rhetorical seduction establishes intimate bonds to manipulate Free Blacks into providing the commodity of their fungible bodies in exchange for the humanist possibilities contain within white promises. The rhetoric of the intimate 78 facilitates this manipulation by reconstructing moments of inescapable, miscegenational interactions into democratic, equal exchanges that eradicates the reality of the compromised positionality of enslavement. This reconstruction forecloses the likelihood of genuine consent and agency for those who

77 Frank Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?,” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (June 2003): 225–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/1350463032000101579. 78 The rhetoric of the intimate is a term I coin to articulate how interpersonal interactions function as artifacts of rhetorical discourse that communicates the metaphysical positions of disparate bodies following the social formations that rhetorically/affectively justify the creation of American slavery and genocide as naturalized, immutable, and divine conceived even during eras of “reform”

occupy the abject objecthood of Blackness. The occlusion of Black consent’s

(im)possibility is accomplished through the fungibility of Black flesh, which continuously transmogrifies the Black body into “raw material and an expression of spatial expansion used for hu(Man) ascendancy under conquest.” 79 Black consent then needs to be understood as a fraught rhetorical move, 80 that operates as an affective commodity, or a display of performed Black feeling.81 This feeling is then transformed into immaterial labor that symbolically/metaphorically provides institutions of whiteness a re-presentation of postracial dynamics that authenticates the governing logics of exclusion/obliteration. While Dante is required to publicly deny Marie, privately he requires Marie’s magic, body, and love to achieve any of his ambitions or goals. As

Dante seduces Marie, he lauds Marie as being especially different from other women he has encountered:

“But you are more than pretty. You're possessing beauty, you're possessing magic. Far as I can see. You are more than pretty, it takes a lot to move me, And you move me, you move me, you move me.”

Marie’s Black flesh and the mystic excess it contains function as a crucial medium/commodity for Dante to gain the material and immaterial means to excel from the proletariat status of sailor to a higher, authoritative rank of Chicago’s mayoral office.

To secure her compliance, Dante seduces Marie with promises of a life beyond the confines of her family’s plantation.

79 King, “The Labor of (Re)Reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(Ly).” 80 A persuasive tactic during intersubjective exchanges that operates within the affective economy to translate extralinguistic feeling into socially enforced meanings 81 Here I am referring to Tyrone Palmer’s definition of Black feeling as an affective excess of Black expression that is intuitions of whiteness seek to examine and regulate Tyrone S. Palmer, ““What Feels More Than Feeling?”

“We’ll see some heavenly things in Chicago, there you’re gonna be loved. I promise you. Take what is yours and don’t look back. Just hold on to my hand. It’s dangerous, I know. We’re gonna get to Chicago. We have to, need to, go. I promise you.

Marie, like her mother, is deeply tempted by such a promise because of the liberatory possibility it contains. White promises can be understood as an extra-valuable affective currency because the promise of possible access into the Human subjectivity was/is an offer too tempting (and dangerous) to decline. The rhetorical exchange of trading Black consent for white promises becomes re-presented into seductive narrative of progressive postracial negotiation which exonerate/exalts whiteness for ‘resolving’ the horrors of slavery through offering “a promise of possibility that can only be realized in an indefinite future.” 82 White promises of Freedom, Uplift, and Justice for Black consent reinforce the logics of exclusion and obliteration by super-valuing the enthymeme of

Humanity.

White promises function as currency in rhetorical seduction because they attempt to bribe Black beings into forming intimate bonds with whiteness, ameliorating the promiser from the gratuitously violent binary of white/Black while reifying their authority as master. The rhetorical act of promise accomplishes this manipulation through a politics of recognition that acknowledges the unlive-ability of Black fungibility then offers escape from unlive-ability through the promise of humanist possibility. Dante’s promises are powerfully seductive to Marie because they represent a line of flight away from her restrictive life on the plantation to the endless possibilities of an almost human

82 Calvin L. Warren, “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope,” CR: The New Centennial Review 15, no. 1 (2015): 215–48, https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.15.1.0215.

life. The chorus of imprison women highlight the intensity of Marie’s passions after she murders her maidservant to protect her future with Dante:

“And you would lie, for the sake of him. And you would harm, anyone else but him. Oh but the way he held onto to you. His shoulder blades. His seed. In all of the stars, in all the universe. Am I the only creature feeling this? Fallen into deep. Ocean is different. To enter Paradise, you have to sacrifice. Dangerous. Powerless. Beautiful.”

The chance to fulfill the desire of belonging to Humanity through the development of intimacy with Dante fastens Marie as a willing commodity. However, the logics of exclusion/obliteration embedded within white promises leaves Marie in a disorienting state of vertigo that is indescribably vehement and renders her life incoherent to those disinclined to reckon with the fungibility of her existence.

The private, intimate relationships Marie develops with Dante while being expunged from his public life demonstrates how white promises operate within unequal terms of engagement. Marie’s Blackness continuously relegates her into zones of exclusion/obliteration despite her willful cooperation within structures of whiteness and

Dante’s promises. Despite Marie’s familial, business and romantic ties to civil society, she can never legitimate her relations to advance her position because her Black flesh

Blackens, or taints, the pristine whiteness of their legacy and social standing. Marie’s

Black flesh may service the desires and pleasures of Human (white) life, but she can never receive the compensation for her service (access to Humanity). Marie can never ratify the promise because the nothingness or null valuing of her Black flesh excludes her from the super-valued status of Humanity.

Dante : Whatever sins you committed, there on your soul. Not mine.

Marie : Isn’t bigamy a sin? Dante : You were never my wife. Marie : In every way! Dante : Y-You-you can’t see reason Marie : I see arrogance, corruption! Dante : I risked plenty for you! Marie : Corrupt my babies! Dante : My boys have got a future with me! Marie : Future?!? Future? 83 Dante : That’s right! Marie : You will be very old when you die… No one will witness your death Dante : …its eaten you alive hasn’t it? The way you love me. But it’s done.. all that, it’s done Marie. Marie : It’s not…done Dante’s denial of his relationship with Marie demonstrates how the same white authorization that offers seductive promises has the same power to erase from the canon of his world. When confronted about abandoning Marie, Dante absolves himself of any guilt and displaces accountability to Marie by denoting her consent to their relationship.

Dante supports his claim when he evokes a happy memory of he and Marie playing with their sons and signing to them the parable of the Scorpion and the Frog. 84

[the Frog] cried before he floundered, “You promised not to sting! Now you’re sending us both to cool and water graves.” And the scorpion said, “Can’t help it if I love my stinging,” he sighed before he died. “To sting you is my nature. And Nature can’t be denied

83 Imagine this said in Soulja Boy-like disbelief 84 The Scorpion and the Frog summary needed

This parable reiterates Isherwood’s criticism of the purposefully unthinkability of fungible life Marie has cultivated. The ‘choice’ to carry the scorpion (Dante) while knowing its preordained nature to ‘sting’ (violate the terms of the terms of their agreement) before the frog (Marie) can receive recompense for their help demonstrates how Black consent is pathologized to validate the niggativity ascribed to Black agency.

The rhetoric of the intimate lulls Black participants into a paradoxical positionality where Blackness is assumed to have the agency “to negotiate a personal domain of autonomy within conditions of legal and social subjection.”85 This incoherent sociality is imbued with an unimagined affective excess that is both criminalized and desired by whiteness as a “chaotic threat” that also coheres the enthymeme of Humanity which operates as security apparatus of whiteness. 86 Black consent is valued as naturally reoccurring affective resource which justifies the degradation of Black objectification by re-presenting it as contractual, therefore rightful, labor. The rhetoric of the intimate rewrites these actions as opportunistic exchanges where Black bodies can democratically participate with Human subjects and succeed (attaining at least proximity to Humanity) or fail (remain within zones of Niggativity) of their own accord. What Black accountability seeks to obfuscate is the sticky affect of enslavement and how the rhetoric of the intimate transmutes the possibilities for Blackness to have the agency to produce uncoerced consent within miscegenational exchanges. Through the well-defined signifiers of consent and promise, an illusory Black subject is constructed with an

85 “Slavery as Contract: Betty’s Case and the Question of Freedom: Law & Literature: Vol 27, No 3,” accessed December 10, 2019, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1535685X.2015.1058621?casa_token=sZKYxoud2SUAAAA A:RoByEy37Ojf57ZePukCTaTfPiESaMSHPPC2YAZtFBLBaqv6TehsqLJpUxKm4maZpnHLSukV7r2Y. 86 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “‘Theorizing in a Void,’” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (July 2018): 617–48, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-6942195.

affirmative agency that places the burden of accountability onto Blackness to accept (or refuse) 87 whiteness’ consumption of Black flesh. If Blackness consents, then it has exercised the will to comply with their circumstances in an “equal enough” exchange which means the interaction was ultimately justifiable even if whiteness’ promises go unfulfilled. If Blackness refuses, then it is criminalized for its noncompliance, it is brutalized into submission and the exchange is either expunged as an impossibility or recorded as a warning to others’ potential noncompliance.

Marie exemplifies this paradox, as her decision to follow Dante is understood by a dominant (i.e white) audience as a foolishly “risible” judgment on Marie’s part, but her refusal to be excommunicated is also seen as the “distasteful doings of a standard sociopath.” 88 Dante’s breaking of his promise exhibits how the allure of promises obscures the anti-Black dynamics of power that prevent the fulfilment of that promise and that allows Dante to withdraw his promise at his will. This dynamic of power also protects Dante from any of Marie’s resistance, as she is violently suppressed by Gates and his henchmen preventing her from remaining in Chicago or escaping with her sons.

Magdalena’s offer to help Marie with an alternative set of promises displays how white promises masquerade themselves as good faith gestures just despite being the same gesture Dante performed. Dante’s culpability for the eventual reneging of the promise or their construction of the very architecture that excludes Blackness from Human’s protected status is camouflaged by the counterinsurgent logic of Black accountability.

There can be no vortex of feeling that renders Marie’s choices as legible because her

87 The strikethrough here indicate how the slave’s refusal was not only violently suppress but also systematically struck from historical record. 88 Isherwood, “Marie Christine.”

existence as a fungible commodity prevents her from participating with the liberal humanist frame of consensual democratic engagement.

Black performances like Marie Christine within postracial cultural productions are important objects of study not because these works enfranchise or reform this violent expropriation of power, as the normative rhetorical forum and form suggests. Instead, these works are important because they reveal how Black Re-Presentation within postracial cultural productions operate as speculative frame within an anti-Black narrative architecture that coerces Black participants into consenting to the fixed dynamics of raciality. Postracial cultural productions cooperate with the rhetoric of the intimate to arrange the tragic plot of Blackness’ undoing by assigning Blackness the hamartia, or fatal flaw, of exclusion/obliteration from the celestial community of Humanity. This hamartia speaks to Blackness’ perpetual dispossession from the metaphysical system of value known as Humanity while sustaining that value system through the superexploitation of Black bodies’ affective excess within the postracial imaginary and social life. 89

“What does an Old Slave Have to Do With Humanity?” Theorizing the Black Tragedy

My reading of Black Re-Presentation through the model of Aristotelian Tragedy extrapolates upon William’s description of chattel slavery as a “historical caesura that has never been sutured.” 90 I argue this caesura- or interruption of being through acts of gratuitous violence- places Black bodies within “various anxiety-driven narratives” that

89 “NotesOnFeminism-2_SaidiyaHartman.Pdf,” accessed November 6, 2019, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c805bf0d86cc90a02b81cdc/t/5db8b219a910fa05af05dbf4/1572 385305368/NotesOnFeminism-2_SaidiyaHartman.pdf. 90 Jaye Austin Williams, “Radical Black Drama-as-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic on the Protracted Event-Horizon,” n.d., 25.

maintains Blackness’ entrapment in an inescapable metaphysical void of nothingness. 91

My argument requires expanding the analysis of emancipated Black bodies, or Free

Blacks, as not only a sociopolitical identity but also as “a speculative frame within which the foundations of humanism and metaphysics in general are challenged.” 92 These narratives construct what I term the Black Tragedy, which describes the abject narrative structure at play within hegemonic cultural productions that interpose enthymemic interpretations of Blackness-as-Nothing through the strategic presencing of Black Flesh.

Drawing upon the Aristotelian model of tragedy, the Black Tragedy functions to circulate

“dramatic imitative representations” of emancipated Black bodies struggling to

“constitute a well-lived life” through the “objective end or point” of human action. 93 The dramatization of Black human action develops a mythos of Blackness that instills an aspiration towards humanness as the only productive route to freedom and defines “the shape (eidos) and boundary (horos)” of humanness through the Black Tragic Hero’s repeated failure to perform human actions. 94 Despite Black Tragic Hero’s admirable efforts, the failure to successfully perform human actions concretizes the metaphysical scripting of Blackness as wayward Inhuman needing to return to its natural placing or be eliminated. Simply put, Black Tragedy operates as a cathartic narrative model where Free

Blacks audiences empathically identify with Black Representations to arose/purge feelings of pity and terror and naturalize submission to structures of whites as a desired practice.

91 Jaye Austin Williams, “Radical Black Drama-as-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic on the Protracted Event-Horizon,” n.d., 25. 92 Warren, Ontological Terror . 93 Rorty, “The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy.” 94 Rorty.

The aesthetic systems of postraciality and catachrestic fantasies unveil how Black

Re-Presentation is used as an onto-epistemological tool that fosters a specialized narrative structure that maintains the powered dynamic of (White) Human over (Black)

Object. This narrative structure proliferates enthymemic interpretations of Black flesh as anxiety/fetish to coerce consensual submission for the promise of incorporation to

Black flesh is routinely atomized and consumed to sustain the erotic formation of

Humanity. 95 Through the lens of Tragedy, I explore how Free Blacks’ inhabitance within cultural works throughout American history results in an abject narrative structure that traps Black people within a violent cycle of struggling to claim Humanity that does not exist.

Reading Black Re-presentation through the model of Black Tragedy allows for a more nuanced reflection of fictional Black character outside of normative and critical cultural frames. Black Tragedy is a vital lens to expose the humanist desires that underpin the fungibility of Black Re-Presentational politics and earnestly confront “the terror of inhabiting existence outside the precincts of humanity and its humanism.” 96 Analyzing

Marie Christine, Invisible Man, and Watchmen beyond the aspirational politics of Black

Re-Presentation exhumes the monstrously intimate history of racial captivity and disrupts the temporal illusions embedded in the broken promise of Emancipation. As Black

95 Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism . 96 Warren, Ontological Terror .

Tragedy, Marie Christine provides a narrative framework which I use to recontextualize celebrated Black cultural works, Invisible Man and Watchmen as Black tragedies. I use these works to expose how the postracial humanist pursuit of Freedom, Uplift, and

Justice for Free Blacks develops into traumatic misadventures which only calcify

Blackness exclusion/obliteration from the community of Humanity .

The Black tragedy borrows the traditional dramatic structure of the Greek

Tragedy by beginning with a prologue 97 that showcases the Black Tragic hero’s resignation to the cruel truths of their world through situating the protagonist at the center of a shocking circumstance. For Marie, this can be observed through her lack of reaction towards her impending lynching while the chorus’ of imprisoned Black women collectively commiserate and interrogate her for her story.

Prisoner 1: Who are you? Prisoner 2: Who? Prisoner 1: Why are you here? Prisoner 2: What did you do to get you here? Prisoner 1: Did you have a trial? Prisoner 3: No trial. Prisoner 2: Sentenced? Prisoner 3: Death. Prisoner 1: Tomorrow. Prisoner 2: Who are you? Prisoner 1: Say something... Prisoner 3: Before the morning, you have a story to be told. Before the morning you have a story to relive.

97 The prologue is the opening dialogue that discusses the events that took place prior to the play

Prisoner 2: Isn't ours to judge you, isn't ours to forgive. All prisoners: Before the morning All prisoners: I will be a witness, I will be a witness, I will be a witness The prologue is then followed by a series of episodes, or a series of past moments in the

Black Tragic Hero’s life. These episodes are coordinated by the character arch of

Hubris 98 , Anagnorisis 99 , Peripeteia 100 , and Catharsis 101 which leads the Black Tragic

Hero to the situation presented in the prologue. These episodes are designed to evoke feelings of pity and fear for protagonists whose existence is conditional upon their adherence to the anti-Black dynamics of power, meaning Marie Christine, The Narrator, and Will Reeves can only enjoy their short-lived moments of empower so long as they obey/consent to the enterprising done to their Black Quare Flesh. Marie Christine demonstrates this arc through Marie’s hubris in her skills as a voodoo practitioner. She brags to Dante about how her talents endears her to various white citizens flock to her and grants her intimate access into, and even direct control over, their deepest desires.

Marie: My mother taught me that I have a gift, and she showed me how I may use it

Marie Christine: Servants who envy their masters.

Laundress: More powerful than her mother.

Marie Christine: Upper-class women wealthy and white.

98 The excessive enjoyment of a powered position that leads to the Black Tragic Hero to disrespect the natural order of the world by attempting to integrate themselves into humanity. 99 The moment of realization where the Black Tragic Hero realizes their flesh irreconcilably forecloses them from Humanity, despite their success or powered position. 100 The turning point where the Black Tragic Hero’s fortune has turn from good to bad and they begin to experience a downfall or ironic twist of fate. 101 The ultimate moment of downfall for the Black Tragic Hero which provokes intense feeling of pity and fear in the audience and achieves a spiritual renewal for the Hero. This spiritual renewal is not one based in normative morality but rather it is the moment the Black Tragic hero truly embraces their placement outside the position of Humanity

Debutante: Her eyes see the future

Marie Christine: Young men hungry for lovers...

Laundress: Miracles...

Young Lover: She sleeps with the devil.

Debutante & Laundress: Miracles.

Young Lover: Miracles.

Marie’s assuredness that her magic and control will promote her from the subordinate status of erotic servicer of white desires to protected humanist status like wife and mother represent Mare’s disrespect of the natural order of her world. Marie’s control over white desires fuels her hubris as she begins to legitimize her miscegenational relationship with the familial bond of marriage and parenthood thinking these bonds will be recognized or appreciate by the world at large. When the pair flee to Chicago, Marie comes to the disturbing realization, or anagnorisis, that her Black flesh firmly bars her from ever establishing her relationship with Dante outside of the terms of racial captivity. Despite

Marie mystical powers and her chilling threats, Dante exerts his protected white authority through his rebuking of Marie’s threats and his evoked ownership of their children.

Marie: No heart could hurt more than losing myself to you. Tell me you’re not frightened of my love. If for all I gave you, your arrogance is all you have to show. I’ll be the fear of the fire at sea

Dante: That’s enough

Marie: I’ll be the sound of the coming storm

Dante: Don’t threaten me!

Marie: I’ll take away what you think is yours

Dante: I don’t want you!

Marie: I’ll take away what I gave to you! You don’t know how far I’d go

Dante: You wanna hurt someone hurt me! I’m taking my boys, what’s mine is mine.

Following this moment of realization, Marie then undergoes a reversal of fortune, or peripeteia, as she is abandoned by Dante, loses her children, harassed by Gates, and forced to made unsatisfactory deals with Magdalena. Marie’s peripeteia denotes how

Marie’s hubris is gratuitously checked through the retaliation of the recurring nemesis 102 of Black tragedies, anti-Blackness. Marie finally reaches her moment of catharsis when convinces Dante to let her spend one final night with her sons and to give his fiancé the gift of a necklace. Dante returns furious from witnessing his wife burn alive from Marie’s gift and is dismayed when he discovered his children have been euthanized. Marie’s retribution against her fixed position at the cost of her own children serves as a cautionary tale that mythologizes the Black desire for freedom beyond subservience is pathologized as a corrupting passion that will become Free Blacks undoing. Rereading

Marie Christine through the model of Black tragedy unveils the abject metanarratives at play which use representations of Blackness to facilitate what Black actions get condemned versus which Black actions get celebrated.

In contrast to Marie Christine, Invisible Man has received universal acclaim as

“the most impressive work of fiction by an American Negro.” 103 While celebrated as literary masterpiece that beautifully blends blues with storytelling, I argue what make

102 Nemesis refer to the unavoidable punishment the Black Tragic Hero must face in retaliation to their hubris, usually expressed through act of gratuitous anti-Black violence 103 Prescott, Orville. "Books of the Times." The New York Times, April 16, 1952. accessed March 22, 2020, http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/99/06/20/specials/ellison-invisible2.html.

Invisible Man an enduring celebrated work is not simply it’s written technique, but rather

Ellison’s commitment to creating an “emotional, atmospheric truth which he drives home with violence, writing about grotesquely violent situations.” Using Marie Christine’ s narrative framework, I reread Ralph Ellison’s irreverent odyssey Invisible Man as a Black

Tragedy which explores the crushing disposability of Free Blacks, regardless of excellence, in the pursuit of Racial Uplift. The Narrator initiates his prologue through his declaration of the invisibility of his being, or whiteness’ refusal to recognize his supposed

Humanity beyond their violent imaginary:

I am an invisible man… I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me. 104

This declaration prompts empathy with the imperceptibility of the Narrator’s being and identify with his efforts to carve out an existence beyond the order of his world. The

Narrator’s episodes unfold in a repeated cycle of hubris, anagnorisis, peripeteia as he moves from his Southern hometown, to the state’s only Negro college, and finally to New

York. With each geographical move, the Narrator displays an excessive pride in his oratorical skills and believes his talents grant him the opportunity to elevate from descendent of slaves to the almost equal of white men. The Narrator is ruthlessly checked for his hubris as he is beaten for entertainment, sent on an impossible career search by his college dean, severely injured while working a factory job, and repeatedly shocked/tortured during his recovery. This series of mishaps leads the Narrator to make

104 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952). Pg 6

an impassioned speech on behalf of an evicted Black couple that excites the crowd into rioting.

"That's a good word, 'Dispossessed'! 'Dispossessed,' eighty-seven years and dispossessed of what? They ain't got nothing, they caint get nothing, they never had nothing. So who was dispossessed?" I growled. "We're law-abiding. So who's being dispossessed? Can it be us? These old ones are out in the snow, but we're here with them. Look at their stuff, not a pit to hiss in, nor a window to shout the news and us right with them. Look at them, not a shack to pray in or an alley to sing the blues! They're facing a gun and we're facing it with them.

The Narrator’s impassioned speech draws the attention of a growing communist organization known as the Brotherhood, who recruit the Narrator as the Black spokesperson for the organization.

Working for the Brotherhood reignites the Narrator’s hubris in his persuasive talents, as he believes his devoted participation will lead to the social uplift of his people.

The economic and social benefits offered by Brotherhood are seductive to the Narrator, who rebuild his hubris and learns to emphatically live by the tenets of the Brotherhood.

The Narrator uses his speeches to persuade the residents of Harlem to ‘discipline’ their radical energies into assisting the liberal project of the Brotherhood as opposed to supporting the revolutionary militance of Black nationalist Ras the Exhorter. However, the Narrator is once again checked for his hubris when the Brotherhood chastises him for deviating from the class-based edicts of their group and focusing too much on race in his speeches that protest the police shooting of ex Brotherhood youth leader, Tod Clifton.

Dedicated Brotherhood member Hambo informs the Narrator that Harlem must soon be sacrificed so that the organization can progress with their vision of a new society. The

Narrator’s demotion prompts his anagnorisis:

It was just like that. It didn't matter because they didn't realize just what had happened, neither my hope nor my failure. My ambition and integrity were nothing to them and my failure was as meaningless as Clifton's. It had been that way all along. Only in the Brotherhood had there seemed a chance for such as us, the mere glimmer of a light, but behind the polished and humane fade of Jack's eye I'd found an amorphous form and a harsh red rawness. And even that was without meaning except for me. 105

Hambo’s discussion of sacrifice attests to how postraciality safeguards the enthymeme of

Humanity and exploits Free Black as mediums. The Narrator’s anagnorisis prompt his to realized that the Brotherhood was never invested in the uplift of the Black residents of

Harlem but rather interested in using them as “raw materials” that advance the goal of the

Brotherhood. 106

Disillusioned with the postracial politics of the Brotherhood, the Narrator is forced to confront the ways his rhetorical talent was capitalized on by the Brotherhood to manipulate and control the of Black residents. While the Narrator does attempt to use subversive tactics to undermine the Brotherhood, his employment as their spokespersons marks him as a traitor to the Harlem community. The Narrator’s fall from inspiring Black leader to a pawn of the Brotherhood demonstrates how the Narrator’s oratorical hubris caused him to become complicit in the Brotherhood’s manipulation instead of actually uplifting the Harlem community. Ras’ demand that the Narrator be lynched for his allegiance with Brotherhood initiates the Narrator’s peripeteia:

"Ignore his lying tongue," Ras shouted. "Hang him up to teach the Black people a lesson, and theer be no more traitors. No more Uncle Toms. Hang him up theer with them blahsted dummies!" 107

105 “Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man. (New York, UNITED STATES: Vintage International, 1952.,” pg 808 106 Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man. ( New York, UNITED STATES: Vintage International, 1952. 107 “Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man. (New York, UNITED STATES: Vintage International, 1952.” pg 890

This reversal of fortune causes the Narrator to flee and fall down a manhole while a pair of officers mock him and trap him underground, where the Narrator remains writing about his experience. The Narrator returns to the prologue to come to terms with how the invisibility of his being prevents him from collaborating with white Humans to uplift

Free Blacks. Rereading Invisible Man through the framework of Black Tragedy allows readers to realize how the Narrator, like Marie, is also seduced by the white promises of the Brotherhood, exploited of his oratorical talents, and then excluded/obliterated due to the abjectification of his flesh. Understanding the Narrator’s journey as a Black Tragic

Hero is vital for learning more about the fungible vortex of feeling that Free Blacks must navigate.

I also recontextualize an admired but controversial cultural work, the HBO series

Watchmen, which tests the ending of the original 1987 comic book 108 by speculating if fear towards a common enemy (extinction) could truly unite human beings under a improved collective Humanity, as Adrian Veidt promised . What makes Watchmen a compelling series to analyze as a Black Tragedy is that the show tests the strength of this newly forged unity by exploring how Free Blacks are incorporated into civil society thirty-four years after the attack on New York. The alternative timeline Watchmen establish initially appears as a postracial utopia, as Free Blacks receive reparations for past grievances and have structural reforms that protect them against police brutality.

However, as the series unfolds it “reorders the fictional universe, writing buried racial

108 At the end of the comic book series, former superhero Adrian Veidt (formally known as Ozymandias) attempt to save humanity from nuclear war by unleashing an artificially created squid-like create on New York, killing millions and traumatizing survivors. After the attack and the possibility of world extinction, the world powers ban together against this unknown and common enemy which Veidt believes will lead to a utopic future

trauma—from slavery to lynching—back into comic-book mythology.” 109 Specifically, the character of Will Reeves aka Hooded Justice is critical to exploring how Justice, or the expectation positive protection from the law, is elusive aspiration for Free Blacks.

Will begins his prologue by standing beside the lynched body of Judd Crawford, the police chief of modern-day Tulsa. Will’s lynching of Crawford is presented as a shocking and unbelievable act of Injustice that it prompts top detective Angela Abar aka Sister

Night to investigate Will and learn his origins. As Angela investigates Will, she learns he is not only her grandfather but also one of the survivors of the premeditated attack on

Tulsa, Oklahoma, famously (mis)remebered the 1921 Race Riot Massacre of Black Wall

Street. Will’s episode initiates with him as a small child watching his favorite film, Trust in the Law, starring elapsed historical figure Bass Reeves who captures and exposes the town’s corrupt sheriff. 110

Priest: Ho! What have you done to our Sheriff?

Bass Reeve (disguised): Your Sheriff is a SCOUNDREL who has stolen your cattle! He does not deserve to wear the badge

Priest: And who might you be, STRANGER?

Bass Reeves: [ reveals himself]

Local boy: Dontcha know who this is? BASS REEVES! The Black Marshall of Oklahoma

Woman: Lynch the thief! String him up!

Bass: There will be no mob justice today! Trust in the law.

109 Emily Nussbaum, “The Incendiary Aims of HBO’s ‘Watchmen,’” The New Yorker, accessed March 22, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/the-incendiary-aims-of-hbos-watchmen. 110 Vincent Woodard, Justin A. Joyce, and Dwight A. McBride, The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture , Sexual Cultures (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

This scene establishes Will’s hubris, his faith in the law serving as a rejoinder to mob violence, as Will believes that the violences he encounters are extra-judicious rather than intrinsic to the metaphysical purpose of the Law. The destruction of his home forces Will to flee with only a letter of protection from his father and an infant as the only other known survivor to Harlem. In Harlem, Will fuels his hubris by following in his idol’s footsteps by enrolling in the police academy, becoming the second Negro officer to join the force.

Lieutenant Battle: Looks like I get the honor of putting a badge on you. What’s your name, Officer?

Will Reeve: William Reeves, sir. And the honor is mine, Lieutenant Battle. I joined the force because of you.

Lieutenant Battle: [ chuckles ] Sorry to hear that. [ leans in and whispers ] Beware of the Cyclops.

Will Reeves: What?

Lieutenant Battle: Congratulations, son. Do us proud. Be safe out there.

Will’s exchange with Lieutenant Battle substantiates his misguided pride in the recuperative capabilities in the law, as he believes the increase presence of Black police officer translates in a decrease of gratuitous violence. While on the force, Will’s trust in the Law becomes shaken as he learns that his fellow officers are complicit in a white supremacist organization, known as Cyclops, who systematically prevent him from challenging white supremacist acts, in particular Fred Trump’s burning of a Jewish delicatessen. To threaten Will into silence, his fellow officers beat and lynch Will to the point of near death, warning him to “keep his Black nose out of white folks’ business, nigger.” This traumatic incident causes Will to fashion a mask from the bag he was

lynched in and achieve racial justice through vigilantism, resulting in him becoming the world’s first superhero Hooded Justice. As Hooded Justice, Will still displays his faith in the curative powers of the Law, as he use subversive means, masked vigilantism, to collect evidence against what he perceives as a extra-judicious threat, Cyclops invading the police force.

To get most help investigating Cyclops, Will joins a collective of superheroes, known as the Minutemen, and begins an affair with white superhero Captain Metropolis aka Nelson Gardner. Nelson and Will’s relationship mirrors Marie’s conflicted desires with Dante, but Nelson’s constant disregard for Will’s fight against Cyclops causes Will to realize that the white supremacy he has been fighting does not arise as an illicit occurrence, but is actually a legally and civically sanctioned process. When Will attempts to tell Nelson of Cyclops’ attempt to brainwash the Black people of Harlem into attacking each other, Nelson begins to gaslight Will:

Nelson Gardner: So, this is your vast and insidious conspiracy? William, you of all people should know. The residents of Harlem cause riots all on their own.

Will Reeves: No, no! This is real! It’s some kind of mesmerism. Cyclops is-

Nelson Gardner: [ interrupt ] Yes, yes, yes. Cyclops, Cyclops, Cyclops. Dear God. So, the Klan is using mind control? Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds? Have you been drinking?

Will Reeves: What? No.

Nelson Gardner: Well, maybe you should be. Come over. You can bring our red file and we can talk about it.

Will Reeves: I don’t want to come over. You need to get the others and come down and help me. You said you would help me.

Nelson Gardner: I’m sorry, William. But this sort of thing isn’t really the Minutemen’s cup of tea. I’m afraid you’re going to have to solve Black unrest all on your own.

Like the Narrator and Marie, Will realizes he has been seduced by the white promises offered by Nelson and the Law and comes to term with the futility of his pursuit for racial

Justice. Following this exchange, Will reencounters Fred Trump who does not recognize

Will as the officer that arrested him, claiming “all you jigs blend together.” Both the phobic and philic response from Fred and Nelson triggers Will into an inconsolable rage and cathartically murders Trump and his compatriots. Will’s cathartic moment propels him to take measures no longer rooted in his trust in the Law, as his interactions reveal to him the impossibility of such a concept. As Black tragedy, Will’s origin story furthers our understanding of the fungibility of Black life even within progressive postracial fantasies.

Although Marie Christine, Invisible Man, and Watchmen are unrelated works, when utilizing the model of Black Tragedy one can discovered how all of these stories function within a fungible narrative structure that solidifies Blackness’ position outside of

Humanity.

“So, I’m Big News?” Black Re-Presentation and the Making of the Black Tragic

Hero

The figure that emerges from this plot is what I coin as the Black Tragic Hero, which follows Aristotle’s characterization of a compromise figure of misfortune that experiences a premonitory downfall through an error of judgment or misreading of their world. This protagonist cannot be registered through the ethical value “good” or “bad” as

neither category allows the examination of the vortex of feeling that accompanies

Blackness navigation of the sticky affects of fate, fixed positionality, and eminency. This means, despite the Black Tragic Hero’s allegedly noble struggle to belong in the world of

Humanity, the Black Tragic Hero’s exigences are ordained by the fixed ontology of their world which renders them powerless to move beyond their fated situation. Analyzing

Black Re-Presentation through the lens of tragedy adds dimensions to scholar-artist Jaye

Austin Williams’ drama theory, a critical methodology that examines the tensions of

Blackness’ incoherency and absence within cultural productions that departs from the

“positivist, futurist, celebratory lenses” of traditional Black cultural studies. 111 My analysis of Black Re-Presentation as tragedy endeavors to “illuminate this violent predicament” of ontological exclusion/obliteration of Black flesh in a manner that does not criminalize nor devalue Black cultural/performative works for not “fulfilling recuperative or prescriptive demands” of neoliberal progress. 112 Through the model of

Tragedy, I attempt to uncover the fungible vortex of feeling of Black desire/pleasure and endeavor to fathom rather than celebrate/criminalize Black beings’ adverse attraction to attaining symbolic struggle for Humanity.

Black tragic heroes are complex in the sense that they attempt a goodwill effort to improve the conditions of their world but fail to achieve it due to three possible hamartia, or errors in judgement:1) they have a false opinion of the world due to a goodwill misreading of the world, 2) they have true opinion of the world but refuse to acknowledge that opinion in service of their own despoiled desires, or 3) they have a

111 Williams, “Radical Black Drama-as-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic on the Protracted Event- Horizon,” n.d. 112 Williams, “Radical Black Drama-as-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic on the Protracted Event- Horizon,” n.d.

“sensible and upright” opinion of the world but is unable to be received by their hearers and therefore cannot recommend the necessary solution. 113 All three protagonists in my study can fit within these three logics, as the temporally chaotic nature of their nemesis, anti-Blackness, results in a constant reliving of the tragedy. However, the prophetic warnings given to each protagonist at the beginning of their tragedy informs that how we understand their hamartia.

The Invisible Man’s Narrator’s prophecy demonstrates his placement within the first category of tragic hero, as the Narrator is under the goodwill misreading that emancipation gifts him a new ontological status that elevates him beyond nothingness.

The Narrator believes that mastery of his performative excess, specifically his oratorical talent, can be utilized as his means of reclaiming his nonexistent place in humanity.

Throughout the novel, the Narrator presents a benevolence conviction that the romantically human possibilities of emancipation and interracial allyship are the best practices to accomplish the human action of Racial Uplift. This leads him to develop a tragic misreading of how rhetoric of the intimate uses the seductive allure surrounding promises of Racial Uplift to validate Blackness’ function as fleshy equipment as an ethical (i.e. productive) project even after the event of emancipation. The Narrator’s misreading also reveals his reoccurring “naivete” about the ways the rhetoric of the intimate deploys the aesthetic system of catachrestic fantasies to erect panoptic apparatuses of external and self-surveillance to re-secure slavery’s afterlife. 114 The

Narrator, like many other Black characters in the novel, is gratuitously exploited for his

113 Charles H. Reeves, “The Aristotelian Concept of the Tragic Hero,” The American Journal of Philology 73, no. 2 (1952): 172–88, https://doi.org/10.2307/291812. 114 “PRESCOTT, ORVILLE. ‘Books of the Times.’ The New York Times, April 16, 1952.”

performative excess to create scenes of subjection that transfigure the “free Black” into a toy, or affective object, that satisfies whiteness’ compulsion for domination. The Narrator does not recognize how all the Black counterparts (with the exception of those he dismiss as troublemakers) he encounters throughout his journey utilize the same mastery of performative excess to satisfy whiteness’ catachrestic fantasies and secure material benefits or symbolic status for themselves. Specifically, the Narrator, Jim Trueblood, Dr.

Bledsoe, Brother Clifton and Brother Hambo all perform acts of niggativity, pornotropic enactments which represent the null value of Blackness for white consumption, to gratify their white counterparts’ fantasy of Black Life in desperate need of white mastery. When the Narrator interacts with these characters a clash of niggativity occurs creating “a crossroads where vertigoes meet” as their performances are continuously unhinged by an indescribable violence which they attempt to conceal through disoriented performances for whiteness. 115 The Narrator’s misunderstanding of how the aesthetics system of catachrestic fantasies produces an erotic structure of white discipline can be most noted during his forced participation in a battle royale after graduation and his prestigious employment as a chauffeur to Mr. Norton, a founder and important donor of the state’s only Negro college.

After high school graduation, the Narrator is invited to give his ceremony speech on the social responsibility of Black people to “cultivate a friendly relation with Southern white man,” to the wealthy, prominent white men in town. When the Narrator arrives, he is immediately forced to participate in mandingo fighting for the amusement of the drunk

115 “Frank B. Wilderson III - The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents - InTensions - Issue 5.0 - Fall/Winter 2011,” accessed December 8, 2019, http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/frankbwildersoniii.php.

townsmen. After being sexual terrorized, brutally beaten and electrocuted, the Narrator finally gets the chance to present his speech after his spectacularized brutalization, which he desperately believes will deeply move the crowd. Ironically, once the Narrator presents his speech he is immediately threatened by the crowd for replacing the words

‘social responsibility’ with ‘social equality’ and is met with “confusion, anger, and discontent.” After reassuring the crowd that the replacement was an unintentional slip of the bloodied tongue, the Narrator is rewarded for his entertainment by receiving a scholarship to state college for Negro students. Rather than become disillusioned by possibility of interracial kinship, the Narrator is “overjoyed” and quickly forgets about his ordeal. That night, the narrator has a dream about attending a circus show with his grandfather, a haunted specter of slavery throughout the novel, and is presented with a matryoshka-styled envelope that finally reads:

“To Whom It May Concern, Keep This Nigger-Boy Running.” 116

The Narrator is haunted by the prophetic dream for years after the incident yet does not gain “insight into its meaning.” The Narrator’s desire for speech and his confusion at his grandfather’s prophetic claim substantiates that his hamartia stems from his goodwill misunderstandings of what his performances is actually accomplishing. Once presented his collegiate scholarship, the Narrator concludes that it was the eloquence of his speech, rather than the brutality he performed for the entertainment of the townsmen, that awarded him with the opportunity of a scholarship. The Narrator cannot come to terms with the reality that interracial communication he seeks is prefigured by Humanity’s erotic drive to discipline Free Black into performance that affirm catachrestic fantasies.

116 Ellison, Invisible Man . Pg 54

Instead, the Narrator is efficiently seduced by the promises of education offered by the townsmen that he actively disregards how these promises are premised on this his willingness to be their toy.

Furthermore, the intimate conversations the Narrator engages in with Mr. Norton also evokes the affective stickiness of enslavement discussed earlier, as Mr. Norton’s memories create a fantastical representation of Black life that still requires the supervision of whiteness. As they drive, Mr. Norton engages the Narrator in an intimate conversation that reflects on Mr. Norton’s “pleasant fate” of assisting newly emancipated

Black people discover “what direction they should turn in” following the abolishment of slavery. Like the white townsmen, Mr. Norton cannot envision the ontic distortion of a

Free Black beyond the imaginary of domination. So he induces a memory that ascribes a respectable narrative onto the freed Black people around him to perform scenes of racial progress to compliment and re-naturalize his benevolent mastery, which he characterizes as his pleasant fate.

So you see, young man, you are involved in my life quite intimately, even though you've never seen me before. You are bound to a great dream and to a beautiful monument. If you become a good farmer, a chef, a preacher, doctor, singer, mechanic -- whatever you become, and even if you fail, you are my fate. And you must write me and tell me the outcome. 117

While Mr. Norton desires do not physically brutalize the narrator, his intimate attachment towards the Narrator’s fate still designates Free Blacks as toys who Mr. Norton can vicariously live through by asserting his authority as sponsor of their educator. Mr.

Norton’s discussion of pleasant fate confounds the Narrator and distracts him into driving

Mr. Norton to the outer regions of campus, where they meet Black residents who disrupt

117 Ellison. pg 71

Mr. Norton’s catachrestic fantasies of racial progress. Particularly noteworthy disruptions are the Narrator and Mr. Norton’s interaction with impoverished sharecropper Jim

Trueblood and a Black veteran.

The Narrator demonstrates his hamartia again through his discomfort and anger towards Jim Trueblood, as he does not realize that Jim perform the same racialized affective labor as the Narrator. Additionally, the Narrator fails to realize that his discomfort stems from the subtle, competitive interaction between he and Jim is a clash between whiteness’ phobic and philic fascination with Blackness. The same way the

Narrator is awarded for his performance of brutality and social responsibility, Mr. Norton and the white townsfolks are tantalized by Jim’s performance of savagery and sexual deviancy. Jim Trueblood “brought disgrace upon the Black community” by raping and impregnating his daughter, which horrifies, intrigues, and compels Mr. Norton and other white townsfolks into paying Jim to recount the incident to them in exchange for financial support for his family. Jim’s recounting of the rape has the Narrator “torn between humiliation and fascination”, as Jim’s performance of disrespectability devastates the Narrator and the University’s carefully crafted, respectable image of progressive Blackness.

Mr. Norton becomes unsettled by Jim’s disturbance of his pleasant fate and orders the Narrator to get him “a little simulant.” The Narrator drives him to the nearest bar, the

Black owned Golden Day, and meets a group of mentally ill Black veterans and Black sex workers. Golden Day’s patrons’ riotous and wayward behavior continue the clash of niggativity, as they rant, solicit, and fight, which further distresses Mr. Norton to the point of collapse. One of the veterans uses his medical knowledge to assist the Narrator

revive Mr. Norton. Fascinated with the vet’s medical knowledge, Mr. Norton again begins to probe the veteran for a performance of niggativity that re-secures Mr. Norton’s desire for benevolent mastery. However, the veteran instead performs another affective disruption which attempts to get the Narrator and Mr. Norton realize the irreconcilable rift between Black subjectivity and human dignity. The veteran’s disruption, much like the prophetic dream, is incomprehensible to the Narrator, which prompts the veteran to rearticulate the Narrator’s hamartia:

To you he is a mark on the score-card of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less -- a Black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force… No, listen. He believes in you as he believes in the beat of his heart. He believes in that great false wisdom taught slaves and pragmatists alike, that white is right. I can tell you his destiny. He'll do your bidding, and for that his blindness is his chief asset. He's your man, friend. Your man and your destiny. Now the two of you descend the stairs into chaos and get the hell out of here. I'm sick of both of you pitiful obscenities! Get out before I do you both the favor of bashing in your heads! 118

The veteran’s proclamation articulates the mutual misrecognition that occurs within the congregation of white fantasy and Black tragedy. His critique of Mr. Norton only seeing the Narrator as a “Black amorphous thing” reiterates Fanon’s articulation of whiteness metaphysical unseeing of Black existence. When Mr. Norton sees the Narrator, his white gaze repudiates the prospect of an authentic Black Being and instead “looks through fantasy and manipulates the Negro as play.” 119 The Narrator serves as a phenomenological vehicle for Mr. Norton, a philic object performs the catachrestic fantasy of racial progress to provide Mr. Norton with the affective pleasures of white saviorism, otherwise known as his pleasant fate. The veteran’s additional critique of the

118 Ellison. pg 154 119 Warren, Ontological Terror .

Narrator’s misrecognition expresses his fatal misreading of the world. Conditioned since birth to accept the “great false wisdom” of white supremacy, the Narrator sees the dynamics of power between himself and Mr. Norton as naturally occurring and divinely ordained rather than synthetically Man-made and pugnaciously enforced. When the

Narrator sees Mr. Norton, he cannot see how Mr. Norton’s positionality is secured through the quotidian accumulation and fungibility of Black flesh. The Narrator can only see the alluring supremacy that engenders Mr. Norton’s Being, and facilitates whiteness’ fantasies in effort to align himself in proximity with that supremacy. However, what is lost in the Narrator’s unseeing is the realization that this facilitation will never result in transferring of power but instead fortify the durability and exclusivity of that power. The ironic emphasis on destiny restates the prophecy of “Keep This Nigger Boy Running,” as the Narrator’s constant struggles to establish progressive interracial allyship causes him to misread the parasitic nature of interracial relations and the metaphysical segregation that undergirds it.

At the beginning of Marie’s tale, we observe her echoing her mother’s warning when she informs her maidservant Lisette that her recognition of her subject-position, or her “becoming a women now” is a lamentable process. Marie sings to her Lissette:

We are ruled by our brothers. We are ruled by our husbands. We jump at the voices of our masters and do as they say. We are bartered and traded along with cattle and cotton. We have to be beautiful and it helps to have a dowry of some kind; We have to show humility; And have the presence of mind to never complain. And they say it's our fault. We were thrown out of Eden to be turned into salt. But there is a way back to Paradise

There is a way; Study all men: Learn what they lack. Sweeten and stroke before you attack. Put up a front then slip through the back; Be on your way back to paradise.

Marie allegorization of Eden’s expulsion from Paradise and Man’s inheritance of

Paradise reveals her cognizance of how the proliferation of the Representation of Western

Man (colonization and the Middle Passage) required the divorcement of Blackness from humanity, what Marie describes as being thrown out of Eden. The allegory also articulates Blackness’ transmutation into affective object that must that produce pleasure for the Western Man, which she characterizes as being turned into salt. Marie description of being “bartered and traded like cattle and cotton” while simultaneously requiring “the presence of mind to never complain” reveals to Lisette the racialized affective labor that coerces Blackness to consent to it conditions with a content and willing demeanor. To

“become a woman,” or an effeminized Black object, Lisette must now become conscious of their unwillingly domination and objectification by the white authoritative masculine figures in their lives, their fathers and brothers. However, Lisette must also still project an affective display that allows whiteness to designate the responsibility of consent/refusal onto Blackness so that she bears the sole responsibility, or fault, of this cannibalization.

Marie’s biblical allusion underscores Woodard’s discussion of how the affects of effeminacy and eroticism are “culturally and spiritually” concomitant with whiteness consumption of Black flesh. Marie offers Lisette a “way back to Paradise” by renovating the racialized affective labor demanded of them into acts of sabotage. Marie sees the rhetoric of the intimate as a potential site of resistance, where she can “sweeten and stroke before you attack.” Marie advises Lisette to utilize her new double consciousness to manipulate whiteness into granting her access back into the Paradise, which represents her recognition and reincorporation into the world Humanity.

As Marie falls deeper in love with Dante, she disavows her accurate opinion of the world (the super exploitative nature of white mastery over Black flesh) in service to her desires. Marie soon abandons her strategy of sabotage by offering the chorus 120 the following defense of her love for Dante:

“He is my release, He is my beginning, He is my escape, He is my way back to

paradise.”

Marie’s designation of Dante as her means to Paradise places her in the second category of the Black tragic hero. Her re-presentation of Dante as escape overwrites her accurate recognition of the structure of power that contours her world. Marie disavows the general dishonor and gratuitous violence attached to her accurate recognition so that she can distinguish her love for Dante as liberatory rather than complicit in the same superexploitative practices her mother cautioned her against. This is discernable in her declaration:

“I will give you my money, I will give you my magic, I will open my body, I will

bear you our child, My love, My Love I will kill…if you wish I will Live if you

give me, Your Love, My Love My Love”

Marie is agonizingly aware of the anti-Black dynamics of power that structures her relationship, which is the endless cannibalization of flesh and excess, but dulls that awareness as she views her relationship with Dante to the only way to recover her humanity. Unlike the Narrator, Marie can recognize the erotic cannibalization at play

120 Marie Christine utilizes a flashback storytelling structure where Marie recounts her tale to a Greek Chorus of Black women prisoners who asks to bear witness to Marie’s tragedy before she hangs in the morning

within interracial relations, but her desire for Dante’s love prompts her to disregard that awareness so that she does not have to reflect on the monstrous intimacies that structure her relationship.

The final type of hamartia is demonstrated by the sixth episode of the HBO series

Watchmen , titled “This Extraordinary Being.” The episode explores the origin story of the world’s first superhero Hooded Justice, a young Black man named Will Reeves. 121

The episode begins with a fictionalized scene from the show-within-a-show, American

Hero Story: Minutemen , where the world’s first superhero, Hooded Justice, is being coerced by the police into revealing his identity or else they will out his homosexual affair with fellow crimefighter Captain Metropolis. Hooded Justice takes off his mask, revealing himself to be a queer white man, but prevents the officers from taking his picture by triumphantly and brutally beating them. While this scene at first glance appears to authentically represent the storied legacy of Hooded Justice, as the episode continues the scene showcases how Will fits into the third category of tragic heroes.

Through the narrative of superhero, Will Reeves-as-Hooded-Justice inhabit heroism that contains the “sensibility” to distrust the recuperability of the Law and the “upright” instinct for restorative justice, shown through the praxis of masked vigilantism. Masked vigilantism signifies an illicit more-than-human excess that establishes a multiplicitous subject designed to dedicate itself to the improvement of its polis through extra judicious, subversive acts. But those more-than-human acts can only be recognized by its audience,

121 Spoiler Alert

the citizens inheriting Hooded Justice’s deeds, through the signifier of white masculine authoritarianism, meaning Hooded Justice-as-Will Reeves can never be realized. 122

The show’s erasure of Will’s Blackness, but not his queerness, from the

Representation of Hooded Justice exemplifies the way that Will’s Blackness acts as an immutable communicative barrier. Despite being an inspirational figure that birthed generations of superheroes, Will’s Black flesh creates an irreconcilable incoherency that elides the possibility of voice. Shanara Reid Brinkley’s criticism of Eric Watts’ theorization of voice explains that the Black body is always already rejected through the abjected less-than-human signifier of pollutant which prevents Free Blacks from creating

“relational negotiations within rhetorical moments.” 123 Voice requires a rhetorical engagement from the speaker that needs to be recognized by the audience to complete the rhetorical moment, but politics of recognition prefigures the Black body with an illicit abject affect so the audience can never recognized the Black speaking subject outside of their preconceived catachrestic fantasies. Hooded Justice re-presentation as a gay white man exposes the “conceptual limits” of Watts’ interpretation of voice, as Will’s subaltern voice as a queer man can access voice so long as it’s recuperated through the signifier of whiteness, but his Blackness must be eradicated to preserve the pristineness of Hooded

Justice’s legacy/authority. The Blackness of Will’s flesh contaminates Hooded Justice’s image in the public imaginary with an inappropriate and improper excess that would render masked hero as a scandal of Blackness rather than a champion of the (white) people.

122 Ponton, “Clothed in Blue Flesh.” 123 Shanara R. Reid-Brinkley, “Voice Dipped in Black,” The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies , July 25, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199982295.013.28.

As the episode continues, viewers uncover Will’s inner life when his estranged granddaughter, Angela Abar, consumes an entire bottle of his Nostalgia, a medication designed for users to re-experience their memories. Angela’s use of Nostalgia to understand her grandfather and his plans exemplifies how Blackness exists in such an incommunicable register that Angela can only learn of her grandfather’s existence through the inheritance of his trauma. As Angela experiences all of Will memories, she inhabits not just the events of his life, but she gains access to his double consciousness as well, as his survival of the Tulsa Massacre conditions him to be constantly vigilant of the anti-Black violence that structures his existence. While Angela experiences Will’s life, she does not just observe static moments in his life but also perceives his awareness of the pervasive anti-Blackness that plagues his existence. June Reeves, Will’s wife and fellow survivor of the massacre, delivers to Will his prophetic message:

“They gave you a gun and a stick. That’s what I’m worried about. What you

gonna do with them? Because you are an angry, angry man Will Reeves.”

June’s warning echoes Fanon’s articulation of the ankylotic rage that stems from

Blackness’ communicative exclusion and stigmatization. The Tulsa massacre informed both Will and June’s realization that the seeming spectacular violence that visits Black flesh was actually a quotidian practice of racial hatred designed for the fortification of white supremacy. This racial hatred destroys the possibility for Blackness to have genuine communication, both inter and intra-communally, because it privatizes concepts like community, selfhood, esteem as exclusive to the Human and forbidden to the Black.

June’s acknowledgement of their shared anger speaks to Blackness’ attempt to metabolize this indigestible hatred which is then transformed to a festering rage that

disjoints Will from himself. Will’s understanding of the inescapability of anti-Black violence causes him to experience a rage that demands an outlet that it will never possess, so instead that rage splits Will’s psyche. While Will attempts to deny his anger, audience and Angela experience his disjointment when the memories of the Klu Klux Klan massacring his community haunt him in the background. And when the Cyclops officers pretend to invite Reeves out before attacking him, he visualizes his memories of Black bodies being dragged behind their car. These moments visualize Dubois’ conceptual apparatus of double conscious, or the subconscious cognition of disjointed experiences of the Black body:

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

The witnessing of the massive, planned violence of the attack on Black Wall Street provided Will with the sensible awareness of Blackness’ exclusion from humanity and their fixed proximity to death. This awareness is accompanied by the sensible approach that allows Will to not only be aware of his positionality but also conscious of how his body is viewed by the white gaze. But this awareness can only remain internal, as it requires Will to utilize his trauma to gain access to this dual seeing. When Will commits himself to becoming Hooded Justice, June prompts him to recall the plot of Trust In the

Law and the childhood memory of Will watching the film plays in the background of

Will/Angela’s mind. June has Will retell the film’s plot, which herald the bravery of the

Black Sheriff of Oklahoma Bass Reeves, to remind Will of the precarious nature of

visible Black heroism. Because Blackness is always already figured as a pollutant nonhuman, the white public could never trust or accept a Black person within a more- than-human status. To protect himself and June, Will starts to paint his eyes with white paint to pass Hooded Justice as a White Man, safeguarding the white public’s admiration for the crimefighter. The subversive tactics the Reeves’ family takes to protect themselves while trying to challenge white supremacy reiterates Fanon’s famed proclamation “whiten or perish!” which confirms both their sensible opinion of their world and their inability to communicate that opinion to their audience. Will’s double consciousness and racial passing proves his cognizance of the anti-Black infrastructure that plagues his existence, and that cognition guides him to the sensible recognition of the anti-Black undercurrents within his world and allow him to create strategies to combat it.

Yet this vision can only be understood through Angela’s experiential erudition, representing the communicative barriers that prevent Will’s sensibility from being fathomed.

As Hooded Justice’s reputation begins to build, Will is approach by Nelson

Gardner, the alias of arising superhero Captain Metropolis. Nelson is assembling a collective of superheroes to organize their masked vigilantism into a united crime fighting unit and he needs the “hero that inspired us all” to sell his idea. Nelson visits

Will and June because he believes, based off the “master strategy” of Captain Metropolis, that Will is using his police contacts to provide Hooded Justice the information to seek out justice. His hypothesis causes June to laugh uncontrollably and correctly surmise

Nelson’s alter ego of Captain Metropolis, juxtaposing the contrast between Will and

June’s double consciousness and Nelson’s white gaze. Because Will and June’s traumatic

origin, they must have a hyperawareness that can accurately deduce the motivations and desires of whiteness, but Nelson white gaze limits how he understands/sees them. Despite being a self-proclaimed master strategist, Nelson does not consider the very obvious possibility of Will-as-Hooded-Justice because he literally cannot envision Will outside of his subservience to white authority. When Will and Nelson begin a sexual relationship,

Nelson repeats June’s request for Will to keep his Blackness a secret (claiming the other superhero would be “less understanding”) and shows a fetish for Will-as-Hooded-Justice.

Conclusion

Black Re-Presentational politics, or post-emancipatory movements that advocate for visibility and recognition as necessary elements for the incorporation of Black bodies into the Western construction of Humanity, shed light on the ways that postracial cultural productions serve as a phenomenological vehicle that naturalize Western discourse on the super-valuing of the Human subject. That is to say, representation acts as a mastery of public imaginary that defines the boundaries that secures Western Humanity as a coherent enthymeme that enfranchises whiteness’ supremacy in the postcolonial, postracial era. This supremacy requires Black flesh to occupy an incoherent position of bounded nothingness that whiteness superexploits to produce the postmodern world.

I argue that Black Re-Presentation is complicit within an intimate communicative process I term as rhetorical seduction. Rhetorical seduction lures Black paramours with promises that offer the possibility of recognition/incorporation into the community of

Humanity in exchange for the affective commodity of Black consent. What this exchange conceals is the insidious practice of the rhetoric of the intimate, which scripts interracial

exchanges to maintain the anti-Black dynamics of white mastery over Black subjection.

This manipulation transforms Black Representation from symbols of linear progress to perpetual tragedies of romantic humanism by dictating and operationalizing the performative excess of disparate bodies into strict, binary dynamics of Past/ Present,

(Human)Self/(Inhuman)Other, Master/Slave, Consent/Refusal, White/Black. The rhetoric of the intimate secures epistemological possibilities to enforce a particularized ontology that controls how We (the globalized community) process history, humanity, and intimacy. The narrative model of Black Tragedy serves as a critical dramatic methodology that allows for the re-examination of Black cultural works beyond of the limited scope of Black Representation. The Black Tragedy uncovers the abject metanarratives that maintain Blackness’ exclusion/obliteration from Humanity and processes how pursuits of white promise of Freedom, Uplift and Justice into traumatic misadventure. Marie Christine, The Narrator and Will Reeve show their audiences the superexploitation inherent in the communicative exchange of rhetorical seduction and how this exchange can lead to moments of retributive violence and reflective creation.

Making Your Own Story: Reckoning and Reimagining the Representational Limits of the Archive

“What part of our history is reinvented and under rugs swept? What part of your memory is selective and tends to forget?”

Alanis Morissette

“What’s all that space in-between where all their storytelling lives that we could latch onto histories, present, pasts… all these dead bodies on the ground, why aren’t we telling those stories

Cheryl Dunye

Humanity-as-Man is able to authentically represent itself as an ethically mandated subjecthood through the “status and the power of the archive.” 124 Achille Mbembe defines the archive as a “symbol of a public institution” that contains a “collection of documents” gathered throughout time to recreate an authenticated Representation of a particular person or event. 125 The archive present itself as a “communal tool of state and society” which citizens of the public can homonomously use to reconstruct the residual remnants of the dead to ameliorate their historical grievances, or “debt.” 126 Black

Representational politics leverages the archive as a kind of mediating technology that promises to redress the metaphysical injury of Social Death, the extra-disciplinary violence causally implemented to (re)define Blackness as abjectified nothingness. The archive offers to Free Blacks what Mbembe describes as “a trade in death.” 127 This trade seduces Free Blacks into giving the archive intimate relics of Black Life in exchange for

124 Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive , ed. Carolyn Hamilton et al. (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2002), 19–27, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010- 0570-8_2. 125 Mbembe. 126 Mbembe. 127 Mbembe.

a kind of concretized subjectivity that allows Black bodies an imagined line of flight away from the inescapable terror of nothingness.

What is obfuscated from this trade is the archive’s intrinsic functionality as a colonial technology, or a rhetorical device of the state that promotes the Western civilization as desirable social formation. The archive mobilizes what I term as the rhetoric of the public, or the curation of intimate communicative exchanges that rationalizes the “paradox” of the West being symbolized as a liberal society while being fueled by the genocide and fungibility of Black and Native lives. 128 By using the rhetoric of the public, the archive produces an “instituting imaginary” that rehabilitates and romanticizes the power relation of racial captivity. 129 This chapter complicates the archive as a site of oppositional resistance, by analyzing author Gayle Jones’ and filmmaker Cheryl Dunye’s narrative critique of the tragic promises of the archive in their germinal works Corregidora and The Watermelon Woman . I will use Corregidora , a neo- slave novel about a genealogy of Black women whose enslaved foremothers use female reproduction as a critical strategy to preserve their denied debts of gratuitous violence, general dishonor, and natal alienation at the hands of their enslaver, to uncover the tragic practice of bio-reproductive storytelling. Bio-reproductive storytelling functions as a constitutive archival strategy that uses Black bodies as matrilineal repositories that

“reassemble” and “consecrate” the traumatizing debts of Black Social Death.130 I critique bio-reproductive storytelling as a tragic practice that is beguiled into participating in the

128 Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive , ed. Carolyn Hamilton et al. (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2002), 19–27, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010- 0570-8_2. 129 Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” 2002. 130 Mbembe.

erosive ritual of the archive in the hopes of achieving white promises of authentic recognition and democratic commemoration. Through my rhetorical analysis of Jones’ exploration of the traumatic heritage of the Corregidora women, I contend that bio- reproductive storytelling results in the tragic self-erosion of Black personhood, the heteronormative (re)production of intragenerational and intracommunal violence.

I will then use Duyne’s creation of her own imagined archive to reconsider critical fabulation, a narrative practice which rearranges the events documented by the archive from Blackness’ contested point of view, as an alternative archival strategy which gestures towards the cataclysmic practice of what I term as Black guerilla expressionism.

Black guerilla expressionism is a counter-archival practice that combats “the racialization of the human” while also imagining “unruly yet generative conceptions of being” for

Black audiences. 131 This aesthetic provides Black bodies with alternative epistemologies and imaginaries dedicated to lovingly reflecting on Blackness in both the wake/break to create a temporal disruption and fantastical that radically imagines Blackness without the redressive promises of Humanity. 132

Burnt Documents, Gold Pieces: The Rehabilitation of Anti-Blackness Through the

Beatification of the Archive

To better explain the seductive promise and tragic eroticism inherent in the archive, one must understand the alluring trade the archive offers to Free Blacks. The archive presents itself as a recuperative democratic space that consumes temporal remnants of Black Life to historicizes and officially acknowledge Humanity’s debt to the

131 Jackson, Becoming Human . 132 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (U of Minnesota Press, 2003); Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016).

slave and their progeny. This situates the archive as an critical site of resistance that puts to “rest” the negative moment 133 of chattel slavery and its violent afterlives (the repetition of Black Social Death after emancipation.) 134 The archive’s promise to commemorate the debts of slavery is especially alluring to Free Blacks, as civil society maintains it historical coherence through “an act of 'chronophagy',” or the destruction of the temporal remnants that document the debts of anti-Black domination. 135 Chronophagy assists the state in repressing the violent legacy of slavery by “structurally silencing” any evidence that attests to Western civilization vicious “transformation of progeny into property under partus sequitur ventrem.” 136 Gayle Jones illustrates this fracturing through memories of

Great-Gram and Gram, whose material receipts of racial abuse and sexual trauma while enslaved by Corregidora are unceremoniously cremated.

Corregidora. Old man Corregidora, the Portuguese slave breeder and whoremonger. (Is that what they call them?) He fucked his own whores and fathered his own breed. They did the fucking and had to bring him the money they made. My grandmama was his daughter, but he was fucking her too. She said when they did away with slavery down there, they burned all the slavery papers so it would be like they never had it.

The burning of Great-Gram and Gram’s papers exposes how the history of slavery and its afterlives is dictated by whiteness’ authority to perform a “stricto sensu,” or denial of

Western society’s accumulating debt to Black bodies. 137 Civil society rehabilitates

Corregidora, and Western Humanity, as an ethical subject through the destruction of the remaining “debris” of Black Social Death that exposes the intimate brutality unpinning

133 I am using Mbembe’s definition of negative moment “a moment when new antagonisms emerge while old ones remain unresolved” Achille Mbembe, “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive,” n.d., 29. 134 Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” 2002. 135 Mbembe. 136 Warren, Ontological Terror . 137 Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” 2002.

this subjectivity. 138 Through the burning of the slavery papers, Corregidora sanitizes his actions as a “slaver and whoremonger” from the history of Humanity and preserves his total authority over Great-Gram and Gram by quashing their lives “through the trap door of nonexistence.” 139 This repression creates an “absence of personhood” for Great-Gram and Gram, rendering the spectacular dishonor they experienced into a generic incident best abandoned in the past. The nonexistence of Black debts then produces what

Christina Sharpe defines as the hold, or the space of enslavement “in which Blackness is produced as nonbeing.” The hold produces an inescapable climate of anti-Blackness where generations of Black bodies experience dehumanizing and “continuing state violence.”

In an attempt to resist this hold, the archive offers itself as a mediating technology that redresses the historical silencing of anti-Black violence through the ritual of commemoration. Commemoration promises to expose the debt of slavery and liberate

Blackness from the hold by cooperatively transforming, as opposed to destroying, remaining relics of Black Social Death into “talismans” that can be codified/memorialized by the public institutions of civil society. 140 These talismans serve as materialist and epistemic reminders that participants can “subjectively experience” to

“learn” about past debts and promise to end the repetition of these terrific actions in the impending future. 141 Cheryl Dunye’s introductory scene in The Watermelon Woman demonstrates the allure of this ritual:

138 Mbembe. 139 Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” February 6, 1975, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating-fascism/. 140 Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” 2002. 141 Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” 2002.

The problem is I don’t know what I want to make a film on. I know it has to be about Black women because our stories have never been told, so I’ve been renting some movies [temporarily rented from the video rental store she works at] and I’ve taken all these films out from the 30’s and 40’s with Black actresses in them, like Hattie McDaniel an Louise Beavers, and in these films, some of these films, the Black actress aren’t even listen in the credits, and I was just totally shocked by that. So, in this one film that came into the store, “Plantation Memories,” I saw the most beautiful Black mammy named Elsie, and I just had to show this, so [shows a clip of Elsie in Plantation Memories.] Her name: The Watermelon Woman. That’s right, The Watermelon Woman. Is “Watermelon Woman” her first name, her last name, or is it her whole name? I don’t know but girlfriend has got it goin’ on, and I think I’ve figured out what my project’s gonna be on. I’m gonna make a movie about her. I’m gonna find out what her real name is, who she was and is, everything I can find out about her, because something in her face, something in the way that she looks and moves is serious, is interesting, and I’m gonna just tell you all about it.

The scene performed by creator/protagonist Cheryl Dunye situates Free Blacks’ subjective experience while engaging with the archive’s ritual of commemoration.

Dunye’s ultimate goal with her film, to tell the untold stories of Black women, initiates the archive’s beginning stages of recovery. Hollywood cinema, like Corregidora, scorches its debt to the Black actresses who played the dehumanizing trope of the

Mammy through citational malpractices in the film credits, which entraps the “never been told” stories of Black women in the hold, like Great-Gram and Gram. To challenge this repression and the hold, Dunye uses her employment at a video rental store (in addition to visiting her mother, a Black film enthusiast and an official archive of local Lesbian history) as a kind of informal (due to is commercial intents) archive where she can gather relics of these actresses’ past, their objectified performance in white films, to reanimate a forgotten Black subject. Dunye’s object of study, the actress discredited as The

Watermelon Woman, then becomes a talisman Faith ‘Fae’ Richardson (her name/existence presumably unearthed through researching the archive) who

commemorates the repressive history of Hollywood cinema and represents the untold stories of Black women. The ritual of commemoration adds to the allure of the archive because it promises to suture the caesural injury through the assemblage of material relics of Black life that communicate Humanity’s historical debt (and recognizes the denial of this debt).

The allure of the archive stems from its historical shift from the authoritarian destruction of the documents of Black Social Death to the liberalist employment as “a communal tool of the state and of society.” 142 This communal tool promotes a “socialism on the other side of crisis” where members of the public becoming co-owners of history to cohere themselves as coherent Human subjects and preserve their debts from the

West’s consumption of time. 143 Like Black employment, co-ownership mobilizes the same discursive shift to forward an humanist fantasy of whiteness’ authority eventually being displace through Blackness’ consent to becoming an affective commodity.

Mbembe explains while the subjective experience of the archive is meant to oppose, or threaten, civil society’s repression of its debts, the archive is an essential tool to constitute the ethical authority of Western Humanity. While the ritual of the archive challenges whiteness’ authority over history by exposing their denial of debts, that authority relies on the ritual’s challenge to disguise their “chronophagy,” or the state’s erotic cannibalization of Blackness’ across time, as a democratic exchange. 144 Great-Gram’s chastisement of Ursa’s doubts about her past demonstrate Free Blacks’ desire/demand for the ritual of commemoration as recuperative strategy.

142 Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” 2002. 143 Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx,” June 2003. 144 Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” 2002.

When I’m telling you something don’t you ever ask if I’m lying. Because they didn’t want to leave no evidence of what they done—so it couldn’t be held against them. And I’m leaving evidence. And you got to leave evidence too. And your children got to leave evidence. And when it come time to hold up the evidence, we got to have evidence to hold up. That’s why they burned all the papers, so there wouldn’t be no evidence to hold up against them.

Great-Gram’s call for Ursa to “leave evidence” echoes Duyne’s motivation to engage in the archive’s ritual of commemoration, in her case through the reproduction of her bloodline, to verify the authenticity of Gram’s and her debts. Her call for the amassing of

“evidence” which speaks to how the archive’s material focus influences the onto- epistemological interpretation of history’s events.145 Great-Gram’s subversive demand her genealogy “hold up,” or commemorate Gram’s and her denied debts shows Free

Blacks’ desire to be legitimated, or judged, by the archive, in the hope of eventually displacing Corregidora’s absolute authority over their existence. The possibility of this displacement brings Great-Gram a sense of affective catharsis/jouissance from the promise that the commemoration of her trauma will one day be publicly judged by the archive of Humanity. Ursa observes:

It was as if the words were helping her, as if the words repeated again and again could be a substitute for memory, were somehow more than the memory. As if it were only the words that kept her anger. Once when she was talking, she started rubbing my thighs with her hands, and I could feel the sweat on my legs. Then she caught herself, and stopped, and held my waist again.

Commemoration is one of civil society’s most powerful affective currency because seduces Black flesh with the possibility of materializing their incinerated memories into talismans that verify and concretized their incinerated trauma. Free Blacks’ deep desire

145 Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” 2002.

for talismans stems from the ability to create an intuiting imaginary that “softens the anger, shame, guilt, or resentment… because of its function of recall.” 146

This desire/pleasure obscures the archive’s collusion with the state to further civil society’s cannibalization of Black Flesh. Using Mbembe’s articulation of the archive’s paradoxical relationship with the state, I expose the archive’s intrinsic functionality as a colonial technology that secures the enthymeme of Human-as-Man through the fungibility, or unfettered exchangeability, of Black flesh. The issue with the catharsis of the archive is that the pleasure it gives over-codes how the rhetoric of the public colludes with the rhetoric of the intimate to codifies Black talismans to “instrumentalize the conventions of the brutal language of the hold.” I recontextualize the archive as a site of institutional civilization, which imminently participates and “multiply” the violence of the hold by cauterizing the history of racial captivity/domination through the instituting fantasy of democratic progress. As a civilizing institutional space, the archive not only breaks its promise of co-ownership and rigs the telos of the ritual of commemoration to

“realize what it [the state] has always dreamed of: the abolition of debt and the possibility of starting afresh.” Commemoration functions within the same racialized affective economy discussed in the previous chapter and commercializes Black talismans as affective commodities that re-present the liberalist fantasies of Western Humanity. This makes the archive a heteronomous space where Black artifacts and Black participants are devalued and excluded by “the keepers of the hold,” or agents of civil society who maintain whiteness’ authority over Black existence. These keepers then use the rhetoric

146 Mbembe.

of the public to affectively rewrite Black talismans to promote the status of the Human- as-Man.

Dunye, both the character and the real-life director, demonstrates the heteronomous nature of the archive through her creation of an “imaginary archive” and her real-world research of formal archive. While visiting the fictional Center for Lesbian

Information and Technology (C.L.I.T), Dunye-the-performer discovers that the state’s chronophagy not only creates a scarcity in the number of Black relics available, the archive’s restrictive possession make theses artifacts unusable, as she is ordered to record any of the artifacts out of “respect.” The fact that Duyne creates a fictitious archive verifies the archive’s inability to challenge civil society’s chronophagy. Dunye-the- director learned that real world archives, like Lesbian Herstory Archives and the Library of Congress, also possessed few materials that tell the stories of Black lesbians in

Hollywood and gatekept those items through expensive admissions. Despite the archive’s presentation as communal tool, Dunye’s engagement with fictional/nonfictional archives confirms the archive’s limited capacity in achieving the goal of resisting the chronophagy of Black debt.

In addition to lacking materials that communicate Blackness’ history, the archive deploys the rhetoric of the public to codify the talismans birthed from the archive’s ritual of commemoration. This codification uses “cycles of taste to distill out the controversy” by aestheticizing the archive to translate Black talismans into a “special celebration” of

“egomania and servitude.” 147 The aestheticization of the archive deploys what Susan

Sontag defines as fascist aesthetic which script Black talismans to perform “the orgiastic

147 Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism.”

transactions between mighty forces and their puppets.” In tandem with repression, fascist aesthetic rehabilitates the ethicality of liberal Human subjectivity by re-presenting Black talismans in a manner that “glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.” 148 Fascist aesthetics gaslights the commemoration of Blackness by romanticizing the dishonor of the slave as an flattering/noble reflection of the heteronormative settler- family formation instead of an intentionally malicious and ritualized practice of dehumanization. Cheryl Dunye demonstrates this beautification through the satirical performance of feminist cultural critic Camilla Paglia.

Well, actually the mammy figure, um, is a great favorite of mine, particularly Hattie McDaniel’s brilliant performance in “Gone With the Wind.” I am really distressed with a lot of the tone of recent African American scholarship. It tries to say about the mammy that- that her largeness of figure is desexualizing, degrading, dehumanizing, um and this seems to me so utterly wrong. Where the large woman is a symbol of abundance and fertility is a kind of goddess figure, even the presence of the mammy in the kitchen, it seems to me, has been misinterpreted. “Oh, the woman in the kitchen is a slave, a servant, a subordinate.” Well my grandmothers, my Italian grandmothers, never left the kitchen. In fact, this is why I dedicated my first book to them… The watermelon seems to me another image that has been misinterpreted by a lot of the Black commentary. The great extended family Italian get-togethers that I remember as a child ended with men bringing out a watermelon and ritualistically cutting it and distributing the pieces to everyone, almost like the communion service. I really dislike this kind of reductionism, of a picture, let’s say, of a small Black boy with a watermelon smiling broadly over it, looking at that as a negative. Why is that not instead a symbol of joy and pleasure and fruitfulness? And after all a piece of watermelon has the colors of the Italian flag, red, white, and green, so I’m biased to that extent. But I think that, um, if the watermelon symbolizes African American culture, rightly so, because look what white middle class feminism stands for: anorexia and bulimia.

Paglia’s analysis of the mammy figure implicitly repeats the denial of debt that

Corregidora and Hollywood films through her discrediting of Free Black’s critique of the

148 Sontag.

Mammy archetype as a “reductionism.” This discrediting exemplifies how the rhetoric of the public disenfranchise Free Black’s subjective experience of the archive by prioritizing her recollections of Black talismans as a joyous symbol of whiteness rather than their grave acknowledgements of the hold’s grip on Blackness. Paglia’s devaluing of “the tone of African American scholarship” expose the archive’s illusory position as a co-owned site, as Free Blacks’ participation is restricted AND their findings are pathologized as incorrect/insufficient. Instead of destroying the existence of the Mammy figure, Paglia uses talismans from Black films and her own genealogy, to beautify the Mammy figure and the watermelon as familial relics of “pleasure and fruitfulness” rather than evidence of the hold’s reproduction of Blackness as “slave, a servant, a subordinate.” The beatification of the Mammy trope enacts the same chronophagy as repression, as the keepers of the hold dispossess the watermelon and the Mammy’s legacy as colonial signifiers of slavehood then (mis)represents them as familial expression of consumable pleasure and joyous excess. This (mis)representational discourse then distorts the trajectory of Free Blacks’ subjective experience of the archive as their talisman’s communicated debts become violently obscured through the rhetoric of the public.

When Dunye-the-performer is unable to use formalized archives, such as

C.L.I.T’s, to document the interior existence of her talisman, the Black women forgotten as The Watermelon Woman, she turns to the intimate and everyday archives curate by the

Free Blacks in her social network and members of public. Dunye’s grassroots approach to the archive’s restrictions allows her to yield key information on elapsed life of The

Watermelon Woman. By examining the personal archives of Dunye’s mother, her mother’s friend Shirley, and Lee Edwards, Dunye-the-performer learns that the actress

known as The Watermelon Woman was Fae Richards- a lesbian club performer who played domestic roles in her white lover’s, Martha Page, Hollywood films. This discovery does produce a critical and subversive reflection on the archive’s establish historical record of not just Fae, but of Martha, the film industry, and the history of racism as well. Paglia even remarks that Dunye has made “an astounding discovery” that she encourages her to “keep pursuing.” However, when Dunye-the-performer is confronted with a letter from Fae’s Black lover, June Walker, she realized that her discovery repeats the rhetoric of the public’s sanitation of the lived experiences and memories of Black people.

Dear Cheryl, you sounded so excited over the phone that I had to write down some thoughts before they escaped me. All that talk about Fae and that white woman got me to remember some unpleasant things about the past. Things that upset me and things that had upset Fae when she was alive. I was so mad that you mentioned the name of Martha Page. Why do you even want to include a white woman in a movie on Fae’s life? Don’t you know she had nothing to do with how people should remember Fae? I think it troubled her soul for the world to see her in those mammy pictures. She did so much, Cheryl, that’s what you have to speak about. She paved the way for kids like you to run around making movies about the past and how we lived then. Please Cheryl, make our history before we are all dead and gone. But if you are really in the family, you better understand that our family will always only have each other. I know this is a lot to be writing down but I wanted to remember it for you now so that the next time I see you we can make it right.

Although Fae’s queer, interracial relationship is a critical archival discovery that contests the chronophagy of Human history, June’s letter aptly points out that this discovery still performs the same beatification as Paglia by cohering Fae’s existence around her romantic relationship with Martha. Commemorating Fae’s affair with Martha

(mis)represents the legacy of The Watermelon Woman by romanticizing Fae’s participation as a Mammy as a loving by-product of her relationship, rather than a

shameful moment of performed subjection that angered and “troubled her soul” until

Fae’s death. The rhetorical beatification of the archive allows for whiteness to reinstate its authority and chronophage The Watermelon’ debts by (mis)representing them as romantic expressions of pleasure/excess.

This counteracts Dunye’s and Great-Gram’s plans of displacing whiteness’ temporal authority over Blackness, as Paglia’s dismissal of Black criticism of anti-Black trope solidify her participation as a keeper of the hold that dispossess Free Blacks of their access and voice in the rituals of the archive. Ursa’s father, Martin, poses a question to the Corregidora women which demonstrates how even Free Blacks can acts as keepers.

“‘I think what really made them dislike Martin was because he had the nerve to ask them what I never had the nerve to ask. ‘What was that?’ ‘How much was hate for Corregidora and how much was love.’” Martin’s question exposes the power and limits of the archive, as the traumatic talismans accumulated by Great-Gram and Gram are still subjectively experienced, even by other Free Blacks, in a manner that “glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.” 149 The jouissance the Corregidora foremothers feel during the ritual of commemoration is (mis)interpreted by the Martin, like Paglia, as a consensual affinity for Corregidora rather than a critical strategy against him. Dunye-the- performer’s argument with her close friend Tamara about her fascination for interracial relationships repeats this intracommunal (mis)interpretation. “All I see is that once again you are going out with a white girl acting like she wants to be Black and you are being a

Black girl acting like she wanna be white. I mean what’s up with you Cheryl? You don’t like the color of your skin nowadays?” Tamara questioning of the Dunye’s seemingly

149 Sontag.

counterinsurgent desires showcases how Free Blacks’ participation in the ritual of commemoration is intracommunally (mis)recognized as a desire to be lovingly act as a keeper of the hold. I refer back to June’s letter discussing if Dunye was “really in the family” of Black lesbians to underscore how Free Blacks engagement with the ritual of commemoration results not only in their replication of conventions the hold, shown through the expression of intracommunal protests, but also the archive’s rhetorical beatification of Black debts, talismans, and participants. The rhetoric of the public exploits the public (mis)interpretation of Free Black’s attempted resistance as consensual affinity to accomplish the goal of “removing any subversive factors in the memory” which removes controversy from the historical racialization of Humanity by gaslighting the communal memory of Blackness. 150 Tadpole’s questioning of Great-Gram’s attempt at material commemoration, her preservation of Corregidora’s photograph so her offspring know “who to hate,” emphasizes my point.

“The photograph’s in that brown envelope.”

He took it out and looked at it, put it back. He said nothing. He put the boxes at the foot of the bed.

“He looks like you described him.”

“They say they all get crazy when they get old.”

“How were you really taught to feel about him?” he asked, looking at me hard.

“How I told you,” I said, angry.

Again, the Corregidora women’s attempt to resist the chronophagy of their debts is

(mis)interpreted as a gesture of affection towards Corregidora. Great-Gram’s engagement with the ritual of commemoration generates a fungible vortex of feeling that the archive

150 Mbembe, “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive.”

is unable to translate outside the rhetoric of the public, rendering Black Social Death an unpayable debt because it is an unspeakable (unless ‘civilized’ by the violence of the keepers) death.

Making Generations, or Museums of Trauma? The Corrosive Afterlife of Bio-

Reproductive Storytelling

Both Jones and Dunye’s works confront and demythologize the seductive power of the archive. However, the most compelling facet of their work is their exploration of the subversive narrative strategies that Free Blacks developed to think around and beyond the limits of the archive. Specifically, I argue that Jones’ portrayal of the Corregidora women’s practice of ‘making generations’ provides a crucial detail on how even critical narrative strategies the ritual of commemoration affectively deteriorates the embodied subjectivity of Free Blacks. With the burning of the slavery papers, Great-Gram and

Gram become cognizant of how Corregidora’s white authority renders material relics as unreliable talismans. To compensate for this material lack, Great-Gram and Gram

“overcome and commemorate their traumatic history” through hijacking “the matrilineal heritability of slave status” and retool it into a subversive archival practice of ‘making generations,’ or “inheriting a totalizing maternal narrative” via biological reproduction. 151

To displace Corregidora’s overbearing authority, Great-Gram and Gram root their radical agency in their reproductive capabilities and “obsessively tell” their progenies’, Mama and Ursa, “brutal stories” of their enslavement to Corregidora to develop transform their bloodline into biological archives of their trauma.152 “The important thing is making

151 Li, “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s ‘Corregidora,’” 2006. 152 Li.

generations. They can burn the papers but they can’t burn conscious, Ursa. And that what makes the evidence. And that’s what makes the verdict.”153 With these stories, Great-

Gram and Gram palimpsest Mama and Ursa’s personal subjectivity to intersubjectively commemorate each generation as a uniformed accumulation of talismans that evidence their foremothers’ absolute victimhood and forefather’s enduring brutality. Jones’ recurring theme of making generations shed necessary light on a popularized subversive narrative strategy Free Blacks participate in, which I term bio-reproductive storytelling.

Bio-reproductive storytelling continues the archive’s ritual of commemoration by using the embodied subjectivity of Free Blacks to “create a living history that survives the fabrications and deletions of master narratives.” 154 While there can be no material documents that speak to the Corregidora women’s time in the hold, for example the punitive rape of Great-Gram and hunting of an anonymous Black boy who spoke to her, they can commemorate that time by branding it into the collective consciousness of their bloodline. Ursa’s observation with her mother, Mama, recalling Great-Gram’s rape demonstrates how bio-reproductive storytelling demands that Black bodies do not simply inherit their ancestors’ memories but inhabit those memories as if they were their own.

It was as if she had more than learned it off by heart, though. It was as if their memory, the memory of all the Corregidora women, was her memory too, as strong with her as her own private memory, or almost as strong. But now she was Mama again. 155

Bio-reproductive storytelling creates a kind of critical agency for Great-Gram and Gram as their stories transform Mama into a living talisman who inherits her family’s memories

153 “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.,” pg 29 154 Li, “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s ‘Corregidora,’” 2006. 155 “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.” pg 167

as something more intrinsic to her personhood than “her own private memory.” Great-

Gram and Gram demand Mama and Ursa absent their personhood (like they had to) and

“bear the affective burden of a collective catharsis,” which is receiving a verdict from the archive that convicts Corregidora. 156

Jones’ entwinement of Ursa’s present narrative with her family’s past “provides a powerful critique of the matrilineal model of tradition” as the novel unfolds two fatal flaws in the strategy of bio-reproductive storytelling. 157 First, that bio-reproductive storytelling’s requires the repetition/replication of the conventions of the hold to cohere its totalizing narrative. Second, this storytelling forces Black participants to act as keepers of the hold and violently remake Black bodies into phobic objects to maintain its endurance. These flaws expose how bio-reproductive storytelling transmutes “the resistance of one generation” into “the trauma of another,” erode Free Black’s ability to heal from trauma, develop intimate relations, or imagine a radical Black selfhood. 158

Usra conversation with her second husband, Tadpole, reveals the first flaw of bio- reproductive storytelling. “Procreation. That could also be a slave-breeder’s way of thinking.” 159 While bio-reproductive storytelling radically hijacks a convention of the hold, specifically the womb as a mechanism for amalgamation, that commandeering then fuses the Corregidora women’s resistance to Corregidora’s methodology. To achieve a singular “historical and familial narrative,” the Corregidora women must replicate the

“profound intersubjective sexual violence” of slavery by reducing future generations of

156 Li, “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s ‘Corregidora,’” 2006. 157 Li. 158 Li. 159 “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.” pg 29

Corregidora women to only their reproductive capabilities as evidence rather than property. 160 “Honey, I remember when you was a warm seed inside me, but I tried not to bruise you. Don’t bruise any of your seeds. I won’t, Mama.” 161 When Ursa suffers a miscarriage and hysterectomy after a violent confrontation with Mutt, she experiences an existential crisis about how her inability to procreate severs her from her identity as a

Corregidora woman and ruptures her family’s collective resistance. Her conversation with Tadpole underscores this.

“What do you want, Ursa?” I looked at him with a slight smile that left quickly. “What do you mean?” “What I said. What do you want?” I smiled again. “What all us Corregidora women want. Have been taught to want. To make generations.” I stopped smiling.” 162 Bio-reproductive storytelling conditions the younger Corregidora women to only ground their desire/agency around biologically reproducing their foremothers’ time in the hold.

That becomes these women only means of asserting resistance or agency, which is why

Usra’s hysterectomy is such a compounding source of trauma for her. Without her reproductive capabilities, Usra cannot identify any form of value or pleasure in her existence and is left to sardonically wonder “where’s the next generation?” 163 Bio- reproductive storytelling, like the archive, may offer itself a commemorative site of resistance yet its reliance on conventions of the hold assure that the conditions of the hold must be replicated with the making of each generation.

160 Li, “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s ‘Corregidora,’” 2006. 161 “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.” pg 53 162 “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.” pg 28 163 “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.” pg 11

The conditions of the hold are repeated through bio-reproductive storytelling’s second flaw, which is that its participants must performatively reenactment themselves as the keepers of the hold. Bio-reproductive storytelling relies on keepers of the hold to affectively void Free Blacks’ personhood to transubstantiate them into evidence, which ensures that each generation ushers in the next through imposition historical racial schema and repression of intracommunal debt. Great-Gram, Gram, and even Mama employ “the brutal language of the hold” to over-code all interpersonal interactions their daughters encounter as repetitions of the intimately violent dynamics of slavery. 164 An example of this is the Corregidora women’s recurring demonization of Black men as inherent sexual predators and their surveillance/criminalization of their daughters’ attempts to cultivate intimate bonds. The most noticeable moments of this theme occur when Mama harshly chastises Ursa’s possibly sexual interaction (playing doctor) with a neighborhood boy.

“Don’t you know what that boy was doing? He was feeling up your asshole.” “I couldn’t feel it.” “If I could see it, I know you could feel it.” “Mama, I couldn’t feel it.” “Shut up. If I even think I see anything else, I’ll beat you.” I bet you were fucking before I was born. Before you was thought. “Ursa, what makes your hair so long?” “I got evil in me.” Corregidora’s evil.

164 Sharpe, In the Wake .

Ole man, he just kept rolling … 165 Despite the fact that Mama did not grow up around Corregidora, she unconsciously replicates his policing and hyper-sexualization of interpersonal interactions between

Black bodies, activating her performance as a keeper of the hold. Mama is able to mimic

Corregidora’s sexual pathologization of Black men (and consequentially Black women) from Great-Gram and Gram, who demonize Mama’s marriage to Martin and traumatized

Mama into alienating herself from her sexuality. These performance reveals how bio- reproductive storytelling distorts the “phenomenology of the lived experience of

Blackness” by having its storytellers simulate a historical racial schema, or history of

“affective exchanges” established during colonial slavery, to have its witnesses to only understand themselves and their relations within sexual trauma and racial dehumanization of the hold.

Another poignant example of how bio-reproductive story requires its participants to perform as keepers of the hold is Great-Gram’s censoring of the act that prompted her individual escape from Corregidora. Despite the Corregidora women’s commitment to vividly detailing all of their descendants’ experience while enslaved, the circumstances surrounding Great-Gram’s flight is a mystery, even to Gram.

Mama stayed there with him even after it ended, until she did something that made him wont to kill her, and then she run off and had to leave me. Then he was raising me and doing you know I said what he did. But then sometime after that when she got settled here, she came back for me. That was in 1906. I was about eighteen by then. Naw, she didn’t come near the place herself. She sent somebody to tell me where she was. Naw, she still think he was going to kill her. Whatever it was. By now I think he probly want to take her back, but I don’t think she go back. Shortly after that I went off and met her and then we come back up to Louisiana

165 “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.” pg 54

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where she was living then. Naw, I don’t know what I would’ve done if she hadn’t come. He wanted to keep me, the bastard. But it’s hard to always remember what you were feeling when you ain’t feeling it exactly that way no more. But when she come back for me, I was so happy I didn’t know what to do, and was glad to… 166

During the conclusion of the novel, Ursa deduces what caused Great-Gram to flee while reconciling and engaging in fellatio with her estranged ex-husband Mutt. “A moment of pleasure and excruciating pain at the same time, a moment of broken skin but not sexlessness, a moment just before sexlessness, a moment that stops just before sexlessness, a moment that stops before it breaks the skin: I could kill you. ”167

Considering the resistant logic of making generations, Great-Gram’s attempted oral castration of Corregidora should be proudly recorded as an “act of immense power” that

“transforms her servile position into one of violent agency; if only for a moment.” 168 Yet,

Great-Gram, like Mama, reenacts the position of keeper and “deliberately silences” that act to maintain her totalizing narrative of “utter victimization and the impossibility of agency under the conditions of slavery.” 169 Great-Gram’s individual act of resistance complicates that narrative because it raises an “uncomfortable question” about intracommunal debt, as Great-Gram’s escape left a young Gram vulnerable to

Corregidora’s abuse. 170 Rather than address that debt or reckon with “how the mother’s resistance exacerbated the trauma of the daughter,” Great-Great performs a similar (but not exact) authority as Corregidora by self-censoring her resistance and editing her escape to be commemorated as Gram’s savior as opposed to abandoner. 171 This censoring

166 “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.” pg 103 167 “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.” pg 240 168 Li, “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s ‘Corregidora,’” 2006. 169 Li. 170 Li. 171 Li.

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proves that bio-reproductive storytelling executes the same broken promises as the archive as it fails to recuperates all the Blackness’ debts and reiterates those debts to establish Black flesh as talismans who commemorate selective debts.

What makes Corregidora ’s theme of making generations such a damning critique of the practice of bio-reproductive storytelling is how its intimate exploration of how this commemorative ritual affects not just the Corregidora women, but the Black community as well. Ursa encounters with other characters, specifically her abusive relationship with

Mutt and her discovery of her friend Cat Lawson’s queer relationship with Jeffy, reveals how Free Blacks collectively participate in bio-reproductive storytelling and also perform as keepers of the hold to absolve themselves of complicity and justify their acts of intracommunal violence. In contrast to Ursa’s matrilineal narrative, Mutt only has one story which “was enough for him” which commemorates his great-parents’ enslavement. 172

He said that his great-grandfather—he guessed great-grandfather—had worked as a Blacksmith, hiring hisself out, and bought his freedom, and then he had bought his wife’s freedom. But then he got in debt to these men, and he didn’t have any money, so they come and took his wife. The courts judged that it was legal, because even if she was his wife, and fulfilled the duties of a wife, he had bought her, and so she was also his property, his slave. He said his great-grandfather had just gone crazy after that. You can imagine how he must of felt .173

While Mutt does not have as plentiful a narrative as the Corregidora women, likely due to his lack of womb and temporary status as breeder, his character is still molded by his genealogical history and he is subconsciously motivated by the same desire to commemorate his familial debts. Unlike the Corregidora women, who seek temporary

172 “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.” pg 196 173 “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.” pg 197

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sexual relationships to achieve the procreation necessary for making generation, Mutt strives to redress his patrilineal narrative through securement of a long-term heteronormative coupling with Ursa. In the initial stages of their relationship, Mutt persuades Ursa with promises their commitment to each other will sever them from their intragenerational and release them from the hold. “‘Don’t look like that, Ursa,’ he had said and pulled me toward him. ‘Whichever way you look at it, we ain’t them.’”174 Mutt is so deeply invested in producing a coupling that redresses the debt of his grandfather’s marital dispossession that he begins to become overly possessive over Ursa.

This possessiveness manifest in a multitude of way, a particularly striking example is his attempt to supplant the haunted authority of Corregidora with his own masculinist authority. “Shit, I’m tired a hearing about Corregidora’s women. Why do you have to remember that old bastard anyway?”175 When Ursa resists this displacement, as it deviates from her matrilineal directive, Mutt receives this as a rejection of his authority

(or love) and is a repetition of the dispossession his grandfather experienced. Mutt proceeds to perform as a keeper of the hold by becoming increasingly controlling over

Ursa’s behavior, demanding she no longer sing the blues and attract other men, and asserting his absolute ownership over Usra’s sexuality, often sexually frustrating Ursa to pressure her into quitting her job.

“My pussy, ain’t it, Ursa?” “Yes, Mutt, it’s your pussy.” “My pussy, ain’t it, baby?”

174 “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.” pg 197 175 “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.” pg 201

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“Yes.” 176 This abusive behavior escalates until Mutt gets into a violent confrontation with Ursa that leads to a pregnant Ursa falling down the stairs, whether Mutt pushed her or Ursa fell trying to escape him is left ambiguous. Regardless of that ambiguity, this violent confrontation demonstrates how Mutt’s desire to overcome his family’s debt causes him to violently recreate Ursa to become his evidence instead of the Corregidora women’s.

Cat Lawson, Ursa’s close friend and the town hairdresser, solidifies this point when she attempts to justify her relationship to an underage Jeffy by telling the story of her experiences as a maid.

She was a young woman, about my age. She lived in during the week and every morning at six o’clock she had to get up and get Mr. Hirshorn’s breakfast because he was the supervisor in a plant, and his wife stayed in the bed sleeping. He always waited till she called him, but one morning he was sitting at the table while she was fixing coffee. “You pretty, Catherine, you know that? You pretty, Catherine. A lot of you nigger women is pretty” … “I wanted to come back home to my own bed and not be made a fool of. You know what I mean?” 177 While Cat, like Mutt, is unable to formally participate in bio-reproductive storytelling due to her queer desires, she still employees the method to redress the violence of her past without reckoning with how her relationship with Jeffy reproduces the same violent dynamic of Mr. Hirshorn and Mistress Corregidora. Cat and Mutt’s abusive behavior reveals how bio-reproductive storytelling creates a trajectory of desire for Free Blacks that warps intracommunal communication to become a heteronormative (re)production of the intimately violent dynamics of the hold.

While Jones’ create an illuminating critique of the damaging ritual of bio- reproductive storytelling, she also provides pockets of radical possibility throughout

176 “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.” pg 204 177 Gayle Jones, Corregidora (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986). Pg 99-100

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Ursa’s journey to discover her personhood now that she can no longer make generations.

Specifically, Usra’s use of her singing voice to “explain what I can’t explain” and her conversation with her mother about her relationship with Martin. 178 Both of these moments create “a meaningful and mutually productive social exchange” where the younger Corregidora women do not have to sacrifices their present selves to honor their historical memory. 179 Ursa’s songs and Mama’s private memory deviates from the strict framework of bio-reproductive storytelling and gestures towards an alternative possibility for Black expression and communication that is not rooted in the commemoration of the past.

Sometimes You Have to Create Your Own History: Imagining the Contrapuntal

Potential of Black Guerilla Expressionism

Like Jones, Dunye’s speculative approach to the gaps and silences of the archive reveal the subversive narrative strategies Free Blacks have developed to “displace the archive as the authoritative source for historical documentation.” 180 Unlike Corregidora’s theme of making generations, however, Dunye’s narrative strategy and its “contrapuntal potential” is not made apparent until final moments of the film. 181

Well, things haven’t been going the way I thought they’d be going. Diana and I aren’t Diana and I anymore and Tamera, girlfriend…let’s just hope we can work things out soon. You know, I thought it was gonna be easy. I thought I was gonna be able to use the camera to document my search for Fae but instead I’m left empty-handed except for this package from June. You know, I wish that neighbor

178 “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.” pg 73 179 Li, “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s ‘Corregidora,’” 2006. 180 Lyz Bly and Kelly Wooten, Make Your Own History : Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century (Los Angeles, UNITED STATES: Litwin Books, 2011), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=3328236. 181 Jackson, Becoming Human .

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of yours had given me your phone number in the hospital because there was so many things I wanted to ask you face to face. [sigh] I mean, I know she meant the world to you but she also meant the world to me and those worlds are different. But the moment she shared with you the life she had with Martha on and off screen, those are precious moments and nobody can change that. But what she means to me, a 25-year-old Black woman, means something else. It means hope, it means inspiration, it means possibility. It means history. And most importantly, what I understand is that I’m gonna be the one who says, “I am a Black lesbian filmmaker who’s just beginning but I’m gonna say a lot more and have a lot more work to do.” Anyway, what y’all have been waiting for, The Biography of The Watermelon Woman, Fae Richards, Faith Richardson.

The grievances articulated in the above passage expose the broken promises of the ritual of commemoration, as Dunye (as the character and the director) is unable to use the archive uncover the forgotten life of The Watermelon Woman. Despite being “left empty-handed,” Dunye-the-performer still expresses the importance of her project for the development of her artistic and interior selfhood and authorizes herself as a “Black lesbian filmmaker” with “a lot more work to do.” Finally, Dunye-the-performer presents a detailed montage of Fae’s life and career interposed with the final credits of the film, ending with the message “Sometimes you have to create your own history. The

Watermelon Woman is fiction.” These final sentences enable the radically reexamination of the telos of The Watermelon Woman and gestures towards the “unruly but generative” potentiality of critical fabulation as a in(ter)vention of the representational politics of the archive. 182

Comparing Dunye-the-performer initial and final self-interview, I demonstrate how Dunye-the-director dramatizes Free Blacks’ metaphysical dilemma of contending with the violent absences and rituals of the archive. Dunye’s primary goal, using

182 Jackson.

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historical precedent to tell the stories of Black women, reaches an unsatisfactory conclusion when the conventions of the archive (real and imagined) are unable to be present the existence of Faith Richardson without the re-presenting of whiteness’ troubling account of her as The Watermelon Women. This re-presentation results in the damage of Dunye’s intimate relations with her Black lesbian family, June, Fae and

Tamara, for taxing assimilatory relationships with the archive and white lovers Martha and Diana. Yet, in the face of these realizations, Dunye, the performer and director, still performs a rhetorical gesture “for something better than the racist representations of

African-American women in Hollywood films” or the archive. 183 I argue that Dunye’s declaration of her radical agency as a “Black lesbian filmmaker” and her mission to make her stories “instantiates a new mode of historical knowing, and models a praxis for others grappling with the limits of the archive.”184

In contrast to the strategy of bio-reproductive storytelling, Dunye-the-director does not place the onus on the Black female body to produce a literal or exacting account of her or her bloodline’s subjective experience of the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the

Library of Congress. Instead, Dunye-the-director plays with plays with the power relations of the archive, or “dramatizes the challenge” of the archive’s structural regulation of the (hi)stories of slavery to develop an imaginative space within the

“asterisk in the grand narrative of history.” 185 The Watermelon Woman’ s satiric imagination of the Dunye’s challenge with Black women’s present absence in the archive leads the fictionalized account of an innovated figure, Fae Richards. This figure is not

183 Bly and Wooten, Make Your Own History : Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century . 184 Bly and Wooten. 185 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe , no. 26 (2008): 1–14.

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created to commemorate or evidence the debts of the hold but to emblematize an in(ter)ventive form of historical knowing that “weaves present, past, and future in retelling… the time of slavery as our present.” 186 With the declaration of The

Watermelon Woman as fiction-hood, I argue that Dunye’s exposes and exceeds the limits of the archive by visually replicating the narrative strategy of critical fabulation as a necessary in(ter)vention of the archive.

Rather than perform the assimilationist ritual of commemoration, critical fabulation “dramatize[s] the production of nothing” or uses Black cultural works to play with/against the archival absenting of Black quare bodies.187 Dunye’s embodies this dramatic method by using her film to intervene within the gaps of the Lesbian Herstory

Archives and the Library of Congress and presenting (as opposed to re-presenting) an invented story of Dunye and her community embarking on the impossible quest to tell the story of Fae Richards and her community. This multidimensional artistic practice of intervention/invention endeavors to personally situate a chorus of Black subjects “in the picture of these sacred tropes of narrative and identity” to spark a fugitive and radial discourse that ruptures the dominant rhetoric of the Human. 188 Critical Fabulation should be explored as necessary starting place for Black rhetoricians attempting to think

186 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” June 1, 2008. 187 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 2008. 188 Schindel, Daniel, Nick Newman, Leonard Pearce, Jack Cunliffe, John Fink, and Jordan Raup. “Cheryl Dunye on Making History with 'The Watermelon Woman,' Representation, and Performance.” The Film Stage, December 17, 2019. https://thefilmstage.com/cheryl-dunye-on-making-history-with-the- watermelon-woman-representation-and-performance/.

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through/against/beyond the representational politics of the archive to develop Black modes of being/feeling/knowing that “gets at kind of a different level of truth.”189

What The Watermelon Woman means to me, as a 25 year old Black women grappling with the predetermined disposability of my being, is an onto-epistemic opportunity to traverse the limitation of Black Representation. What Cheryl Dunye means to me as a 25 year old Black woman is that there are ways Free Blacks can learn Black

(hi)stories without endless reproducing/replicating the monstrous intimacies of slavery in the hopes of redressing metaphysical, physical, and sexual wounds of the hold. Critical fabulation employs the intimate cultural method of fabricating a personal yet collective history of an enigmatic collective of forgotten Black figures who cultivates fugitive social formations Black kinship, care, and love to survive and rebel against the fungible circumstances of their time. Their narratives provide an in(ter)vention of archive by countering its rhetoric and distributing affective models for self and communal healing from the horrors of the hold. Critical fabulation signals towards a counter-rhetorical possibility of what I define Black Guerilla Expressionism.

Black Guerilla Expressionism operates as a rhetorical tactic that unburdens Free

Blacks from the representational panopticon of the archive by “subverting the tokenizing mechanisms through which publicity… reproduces invisibility through the guise of empowerment.”190 By hijacking modes of cultural production, as opposed to bloodlines,

Black Guerilla Expressionism disseminates (im)possible stories that explore the “flesh to

189 Schindel, Daniel, Nick Newman, Leonard Pearce, Jack Cunliffe, John Fink, and Jordan Raup. “Cheryl Dunye on Making History with 'The Watermelon Woman,' Representation, and Performance.” The Film Stage, December 17, 2019. https://thefilmstage.com/cheryl-dunye-on-making-history-with-the- watermelon-woman-representation-and-performance/. 190 Tavia Nyongo, “Unburdening Representation,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (June 22, 2014): 70–81.

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flesh experience” of Black intimacy as a “text” for revolutionary worlding. 191 This worlding allows for Free Blacks to evades/combat the archive’s grammars of capture and suffering and revitalizes the radical energies necessary to continue the work of telling

Black (his)stories without contributing the continuation of the hold. Black Guerilla

Expressionism provides Free Blacks with fugitive forms of knowledge creation that decenter the codified and commercialized production of the singular Black Tragic Hero to waywardly imaging the Black Chorus. Imaging the Black Chorus provides an edifying model for Black radical planning, as it attempts to thinking through how one can override anti-Blackness’ deeply ingrained discourse and how We (the Black Masses) can begin to formulate a form of communal Black Life the refuses to yield to the Humanity’s logics.

Additionally, this radical Black imaginary contemplates the ways We can imagine an intimacy that is involved in the adornment of pathologized Black kinship, rather than enfolded into the normative ethics of the Human.

Conclusion

The archive of slavery is representative of the boundaries that limits the practice of remembering and telling the stories of Black gendered bodies as it “regulates and organizes the kinds of statements that can be made about slavery and as well it creates subjects and objects of power.”191 Critical fabulation serves not only as a speculative counternarrative recovery process but is also rhetorical intervention Black women or

Black gender bodies undergo to improperly reproduce the forgotten legacies of Black gendered flesh who have been systematically sanitized by the violence of archive. What

190 The quote refers to Saidiya Hartman’s Instagram Live interview with the podcast Cheeky Natives 191 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” June 1, 2008.

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my next chapter will largely focus on, is critical fabulation’s ability to highlight the praxis of furtive communication, the clandestine interpersonal communication between

Black bodies, particularly when under duress from sites of weaponized anti-Blackness

(i.e prisons, schools, state buildings, laws etc), that serves as survivalist and even revolutionary tool for Black gendered bodies in the face of continued anti-Black state violence.

While critical fabulation is a rich counter archive containing multitudes of speculative works that depicts key themes of Black gendered communication in struggle, for my discussion of radical potential of furtive communication. Furtive communication is a rhetorical counter tactic that creates forms of affective metabolization that assists

Black bodies in the development of practices of self-care and revolutionary community building. I will focus on a critical fabulation of my experiences working at a predominately white institution last year as a rhetorical intervention that navigates the structural antagonisms and “status criminality” imposed upon Black women across time, while revealing furtive communication’s revolutionary potential. My speculative narratives re-arrange the recorded historical violence of the archive and re-presents them in order to describe ‘the resistance of the object.’ The practice of reimagining the Black social life challenges the Western Canon of the archive which relegates the genealogy of

Black feminist epistemology into zones of death. My paper will compare these narratives to demonstrate the ontological violence of the archive then use the process of critical fabulation to explain the radical potential of telling stories of Black life in events of social death.

Dear Mother

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I can no longer make it as your daughter. I can no longer bear the weight of being the evidence of our pain. I don’t feel, I don’t love, I don’t think, I don’t dream. I fuck and get fucked. By Him. By Them. By You. I cry for a love forever lost to the deaf grunts of a lust that only cums for my tears, my tortured dark flesh, my stifled mouth. Hear me love, before I am crucified and displayed to pay tribute to a legacy of flesh making flesh to make more flesh. Never loving flesh, touching flesh, desiring flesh but simply making flesh so they too can fuck and be fucked. Pray for me Love, as I birth another generation of who also can no longer make it as my children, as my pain. As my mother’s pain. As her mother’s pain. As her mother’s pain. Fear for me Love, as I refuse to continue to live by the cruel promises of this world. Bear with me Love, as I wholehearted and clumsily plunge into the unmarked abyss of Blackness where I seek to find a revelry of the very essence of my presence beyond the corrosive ideals of a Humanity that were never designed to recognize me, feel me, see me. Heal with me Love, as we air out the deep wounds of our trauma and begin to mend the fractures of our flesh. Forgive with me Love, for the times we’ve made each other the target of our rage, our sorrow, our despair. Plot with me love, as I scramble together a means of desperate attack against the settlement of

Humanity through the validation- both self and communal- of my Black life, of your

Black life, of our Black lives. Fight with me Love, fight to imagine a chaotic realm

Blackness that creates an expression that challenges the panoptic grammars of capture and the violent hegemony of the Human. Dream with me Love, dream of a Black

Fantastic that weaves together a tapestry of our joys, our heartbreaks, our absurdities, and our passions. Mother, I forgive you for the ways your mothering could not nourish me, and I hope you can forgive me for no longer shouldering the weight of our

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exploitation and instead embracing the outsideness of my existence. My mother. My Love.

If you cannot join me just yet, I hope you can at least feel me as I jump into the fungible abyss to grow an improper and uncivilized Black Life that does not necessitate the benchmark of Humanity to accredit its value.

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Dirty If You Were Different: The Erotic Pathologization of Black Femme Excess and the Radical Potential of Critical Fabulation

“Slavery is an inherited memory, not a reality that she has experienced firsthand. However, it strongly influences her understanding of social relations … as well as to the powerful forms of resistance that Black women have employed in order to endure and to tell their stories.” Stephanie Li

Last year, I had accepted a fellowship opportunity with a top university and as a way of making additional income, I agreed to work with the university’s debate team as a hired judge who traveled with the team to national tournaments. The head coach of the debate team, who ws also oversaw my fellowship, sent me an email to inform me on room arrangements for the upcoming tournament at Kentucky University. In the email, simply titled ‘rooming with another coach’, my boss communicated to me that I would be sharing a room with one of the hired coaches, “Corey mostly likely, though you can have your pick. Let me know if that’s not ok.” Sharing rooms is a fairly common arrangement for large debate teams and hired staff are usually roomed separately from the students, but what surprised me were the particulars of the email. Since assigning rooms based on heteronormative understandings of gender is also the norm, I was surprised that I was the only one whose gender was not considered while planning room assignments. I was further confused by the email’s assertion that the “most likely” candidate for my room assignment would be the only other Black employee on the traveling staff, despite the fact that I did not know him prior to the email. The most laughable part of the email was the last portion, which presented me with a “choice.” To accept the choice made for me or to make my discomfort with the choice that had already been made known. The “let me

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know if that’s not ok” signified two things: an acknowledgement of the undesirability of the proposed arrangement and a disavowal of that acknowledgement to absolve my boss of any wrongdoing, as his request for my consent erases the possibility of malicious intent. To his request, I expressed my objections to the room assignment and requested an alternative arrangement. My boss’ final resolution to the room assignment was to pair me with Karease, a college debater who was the only other Black woman on the team, instead of Corey.

The email may have appeared innocuous, but this exchange reveals how globalized antiBlackness asserts itself and is able to rhetorically interpolate the metaphysical positioning of my boss, Corey, Karease and myself. Critical work has been done in understanding globalized antiBlackness as a philosophical, sociological, political and historical antagonism, but analysis on how the rhetoric of the public and the rhetoric of the intimate coalesce to naturalize the powered relationship of white mastery upon captive flesh is virtually unexplored. My email is emblematic of how rhetoric of the intimate, interpersonal exchanges between white and Black people, are strategically accumulated into the rhetoric of the public, “shared” public memories which frames the interpretation of events, commands the metaphysical social order through rhetorical acts.

I seek to critically examine how whiteness weaponizes the archive, a collection of historical records, iconography, and documents like my email which provides an assumed public memory and intimate insight on the inner working of a place, institution, or group of people, as an epistemological tool meant to deploy rhetorical arguments that preserve the metaphysical values which signify Blackness status as “property plus.” 192 I then

192 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.”

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evaluate Saidiya Hartman’s methodology of critical fabulation, the scholarly practice of using the gaps and silences of the archive to reconstruct the lost stories and histories of the experiences of subaltern, as a rhetorical invention which challenges the discourse stemming from the archive and allows for Black bodies to engage in rhetorical counter tactics that helps them signify themselves as something else. 193 I compare the critical fabulations of Esther Brown, Cindi Mayweather, and my own history to reveal how the archive speaks Blackness into abjection and how Blackness communicates within this struggle. Specifically, I focus on the counter tactic of furtive communication, the clandestine interpersonal intimate exchange between Black bodies while under the duress of anti-Black violence, for its radical affective potential.

"Trash Em, and Bag Em The Archive's Cleansing of Black Life

While the archive is assumed to be an impartial account of historical events, the advent of chattel slavery and colonialization privileges the act of documentation.

Hortense Spillers investigates the Moynihan Report in her seminal text, Mama’s Baby,

Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book, to deconstruct how “rhetorical symptoms of denial and absence” structures and normalizes the metaphysical hierarchy established by the Middle Passage and American slavery. 194 With two simple sentences, that email not only solidified my boss’ “incontrovertible authority” as a white master, as my consent or non-consent became contingent upon his request, but also stripped Corey and my existence of its gendered subjectivity to mark our bodies as captive flesh. 195 I say this not

193 “Hartman 2008 Venus in Two Acts.Pdf.” 194 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” 195 “Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings | American Literature | Duke University Press,” accessed March 14, 2019, https://read.dukeupress.edu/american- literature/article-abstract/85/4/661/4953.

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to affirm the binary categorization of gender but rather to observe how Black bodies cannot be registered by humanist categories like gender because Blackness signifies an inhuman excess. If the logics of whiteness dictate that gender or occupation be valued characteristics of human subjectivity, the email denies me that specious femaleness or worker-ness and returns me to my “true” position as chattel that needs to be stored with other chattel as efficiently as possible. The email exposes how documents of the archive rhetorically construct a symbolic order, or what Spillers calls “American Grammar.” 196

This symbolic order ascribes particular pathologized meanings onto Black flesh to eradicate it of any significance to reassign value into a logic of whiteness which promotes the racialized dynamics of power constituted through chattel slavery.

Within each admission and omission of lived experiences of Blackness from the archive, a major rhetorical argument is constructed to inaugurate the metaphysical infrastructure of the modern and postmodern world: Blackness exists as nothing but equipment in human form and is designed to assist the “existential journey of the human

Being.” 197 The archive accomplishes their argument by including deleterious representations of Black bodies, or what Calvin Warren terms catachrestic fantasies, so that the only legacy Blackness can inherit is abjection. 198199 Black assigned-female-at- birth (AFAB) bodies are especially vulnerable to this representational violence. The icon of the ‘Black Female Body’ within the archive is enfranchised as a “trope of disorder” which enacts a biocentric discourse that “weds an anatomical model of sexual difference

196 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” 197 Warren, Ontological Terror . 198 Stephanie Li, “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora,” Callaloo 29, no. 1 (2006): 131–50, https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2006.0056. 199 Warren, Ontological Terror .

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to a physiognomic model of race in order to ascribe a bio-ontologizing relational and hierarchical system of value and desire to nature .” 200

The archive mobilizes the iconography of the Black Female Body to erect another rhetorical argument: Without the omnipresent mastery of whiteness, the Black Female

Body is a demonic entity that produces unmitigated chaos into the established order. 201202

American grammar frames whiteness’ rhetorical account of the archive to establish dominant constructions of white subjectivity and uses discourse attached to the iconicity of the Black female body to standardize/justify that construction. This results in a deliberate and insidious misremembering of the legacy and after-effects of slavery, which only recognizes/acknowledges the slave through its total objectification. Black bodies, especially Black AFAB bodies, are then forced to bear a connotation of deviancy in order to sustain this misremembering. Musician Janelle Monae artistically captures how the archive builds and circulates this argument in her visual album Dirty Computer . The dystopian short film follows the critically fabulated Cindi Mayweather who becomes imprisoned at New Dawn, an extension of the state’s technocratic oppression, and is forced to undergo a conversion-therapy-like process called the Cleaning, where bodies who have been signified as ‘dirty’ are ousted of memories that challenge the established symbolic order are purged and Mayweather’s metaphysical positioning as equipment is viciously enforced. Mayweather’s opening monologue in particular speaks to how the archive fixes this ontological violence onto the Black body:

200 Jackson, “‘Theorizing in a Void.’” 201 Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies.” 202 Jackson, “‘Theorizing in a Void.’”

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They started calling us computers. People began vanishing, and the cleaning began. You were dirty if you look different. You were dirty if you refused to live the way they dictated. You were dirty if you showed any form of opposition at all. And if you were dirty, it was only a matter of time. 203 The use of the term dirty computer speaks to the atomized objectivity of Blackness and succinctly depicts how the archive divorces the African slave from the Human to signify its status as available equipment. Mayweather’s repeated use of the word dirty signifies how Blackness’ status post slavery was then criminalized and surveilled by the rhetorical whiteness of archive to censor and police events that produce even the potential to disrupt the overdetermined metaphysical narrative established during slavery. 204 The Cleaners, the white men assigned to expunged Mayweather of any memories that may contributed to her deviancy, perfectly represents the inherent white mastery of the archive. These characters reveal how the archive not only alters public memory to cohere it to the symbolic order, it takes a perverse intimate pleasure in doing so. While they purge

Mayweather of her memories, the cleaners laugh, eat food, and save memories for private repeat viewing. 205 The cleaners’ spectatorship of Mayweather’s memories of state violence reflects how whiteness sanitizes the gratuitous violence impose upon Black bodies by designating them as objects of erotic pleasure in addition to their cargo status. 206207

I survey Hartman’s latest critical fabulation to provide historical context to my analysis Monae’s exposure of the illusory nature of the archive in one of her most recent

203 “Janelle Monáe - Dirty Computer [Emotion Picture] - YouTube,” accessed March 14, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdH2Sy-BlNE&t=917s. 204 Stephanie E. Smallwood, “The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved.” 205 “Janelle Monáe - Dirty Computer [Emotion Picture] - YouTube.” 206 Jones, “The Will to Adorn.” 207 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (June 1, 2008): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2.

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critical fabulation, The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner , where

Hartman explores the elapsed life of Esther Brown, a Black quare woman living in

Harlem at the beginning of the twentieth century who, like Cindi Mayweather, was also detained and tortured by the state. 208 In the introduction of her work, Hartman explains how Esther’s radical politics of refusal and waywardness gets suppressed by the archive.

Just like the characters in Monae’s work, the archival cleaners of historical memory must preserve the symbolic order, so they either dismiss Esther from the archive as a narrative of failure or submit her into the archive as a catachrestic fantasy of status criminality.

Status criminality, like dirty computer, is a rhetorical term that is emblematic of the archive’s deformation of Black life following the historical event of emancipation.

Emancipation threatened Blackness’ metaphysical position within the symbolic order, so new meanings needed to be projected onto the “free” Black to maintain that position. 209210 Status criminality legally signifies Blackness as dereliction to create another rhetorical argument for a world post slavery: Blackness contains an illicit sexual excess that can only be controlled and rehabilitated through the extreme racial and sexual abuse of the state/whiteness. The archive substantiates this by submitting criminalized interpretations of the experiences of Blackness. The exploration of Esther and Cindi’s social life before imprisonment demonstrates how the lives of Black AFAB bodies are particularly warped by the rhetorical arguments of the archive. Esther and Cindi engage

208 E. Patrick Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother,” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (January 2001): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/10462930128119. Quare (Kwaˆr), n. 1. meaning queer; also, opp. of straight; odd or slightly off kilter; from the African American vernacular for queer; sometimes homophobic in usage, but always denotes excess incapable of being contained within conventional categories of being;

209 Warren, Ontological Terror . 210 Hartman, “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner.”

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in a form of poiesis that unabashedly seeks to experience a life ungoverned by the mandate of the symbolic order, that poiesis is penetratingly criminalized and surveilled by institutional extensions of the state (the police, prisons, schools, religions, etc.) that then attempts to “correct” their status criminality, or rather return them to their place as available equipment, through severe brutalization. 211212

When the archive constructs even one’s own flesh as testimony of its abjection and expunges any possible evidence to the contrary, how does the Black body metabolize such an argument? 213214

Jane: They’re taking everything away from me. I don’t even remember how we met anymore. I’m not sure if any of this actually happened. Mary Apple: Listen. Thinking will only make it harder… it’s best if you just… enjoy the process. Accept it. People use to work so hard to be free. But we’re lucky here, all we have to do it forget. Jane: But I don’t wanna forget you. Mary Apple: You don’t have a choice. 215 The excerpt above portrays a haunting exchange between the disconsolate Mayweather, who New Dawn has branded as Jane 57821, and her mislaid lover Zen, who has also been renamed as Mary Apple 53. Mary and Jane’s conversation echo Spillers’ analysis of how the rhetorical arguments of the archive trap free Blacks within a liminal zone between subjectivity and objectivity and use that ambiguity to erode the network of kinship

211 Hartman. 212 “Janelle Monáe - Dirty Computer [Emotion Picture] - YouTube.” The song/scene I am highlighting in particular are “Crazy, Classic, Life”, “Take a Byte”, and the first exchange between Cindi Mayweather and Mary Apple. 213 Li, “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora,” 2006. 214 Whitney, “Affective Indigestion: Lorde, Fanon, and Gutierrez-Rodriguez on Race and Affective Labor,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 30, no. 3 (2016): 278, https://doi.org/10.5325/jspecphil.30.3.0278. 215 “Janelle Monáe - Dirty Computer [Emotion Picture] - YouTube.” The exchange between Mary Apple and Cindi Mayweather following the music video “Make Me Feel” 32:56-34:04

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Blackness has obdurately forged since slavery. 216 When Jane has her memories stripped and messages of her dirtiness are compulsorily impressed upon her, she not only loses her spiritual essence but also her ability to form kinship with Zen. Jane’s historical lack causes her to become insecure in her self-worth and she questions the validity of her relationships, how can she genuinely love what she can no longer remember? The renaming of Cindi and Zen showcases the malleability of Blackness when signified by the archive.

Esther’s imprisonment mirrors Jane’s sentiment, as the disciplinary reports and notes from prison authorities display the archive’s ability to gaslight Blackness’ self- esteem:

Attitude: She is inclined to be sullen and defiant. Came to Bedford with the impression that this was a very bad place and decided that she would not let any of the matrons run over her.” She said “If they keep yelling at her they’ll find that isn’t the way to treat Esther Brown.” And “Esther Brown isn’t going to stand for that.” Note: Patient is a colored girl with good mentality who has had her own way and enjoyed much freedom. The influence of her family and her environment have both been bad. She is the hyperkinetic type which craves continually activity and amusement. 217

The reports demonstrate how the archive’s administration of symbolic order forces Black

AFAB bodies to assimilate into this particularly poisonous argument: Blackness’ quest for freedom spoils the Black Female Body’s and only the indefinite servitude can reform her. This argument generates a kind of indigestible affect within the embodied subjectivity of Black bodies, meaning that the rhetorical arguments of the archive instill the Black body with a disposition or state of mind that believes in its deficiencies. 218 The

216 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” 217 Hartman, “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner.” 218 Whitney, “Affective Indigestion.”

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archive’s affective manipulation of the Black body creates a form a self-distrust inside

Blackness’ psyche, Mary Apple’s response reflects how that distrust is then operationalized by the archive. The archive’s surveillance of Blackness’ excess creates a civilizing affect inside Blackness’ psyche to encourage the communal self-surveilling and policing of Blackness, Black bodies then lose the capacity to craft existence outside of the subjection the archive projects or form kinship with other Black bodies. 219220

“But I Don’t Wanna Forget You” Critical Fabulation as a Method for Inheriting

Traumatic Legacy of the Archive

Karease Quashie had to leave behind her grandmother, mother, and sister in

Brooklyn, New York when she moved to Georgia for college. In high school, Karease began competing in policy debate for her school and for the New York Urban Debate

League. For Karease, debate offered a space where the Black community could gather and develop radical theory and advocacy skills, something she was missing at her predominantly White and Asian high school. When she arrived at college, she gravitated towards the intercollegiate debate team, holding on to the memories of youth and wishing to recapture that feeling of belonging. As the only Black woman on a predominately white team, those cherished memories soon faded and were replaced with disillusioned reminiscences of microaggressions and isolation. We had not known each other, but our lives told the same story. Singular. Lonely. Insecure. Scared. Dysphoric. Black. Growing up in Lawrenceville, Georgia, I was constantly the only Black girl on my debate teams, so

I was often was rejected by my teammates and endured racial abuse from my coaches.

219 Li, “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s ‘Corregidora,’” 2006. 220 Jones, “The Will to Adorn.”

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Karease unsettled me. It was as if her presence alone held a mirror against my innermost self. As we traveled to Kentucky and reached the tournament hotel, a controversial site modeled after a slave plantation, there was a tentative silence between us. Neither of us knew how to interact with the other, as being with another Black woman was an atypical experience for us. As we settle into our quarters, Karease asked me if she could play music the album Ctrl by Sza. We shared a mutual affinity for the album’s theme of struggle and self-discovery as young Black women, and we began to discuss the ways the album struck a personal chord for us. We then began to talk about our experiences in debate, who we trusted and who we were weary of, and soon we began unearthing the amassing pain that came from being alone. Something about that night was felt mystic, as if our communication casted a spell that relieved us of all the trauma we had accumulated throughout debate and our lives in general. That night on the plantation, we ignited a friendship that imparted a care sorely needed.

How can Black bodies cope with ubiquitous messaging of the archive? Hartman grapples with this question by inventing the methodology of Critical Fabulation, a narrative practice which rearranges the events documented by the archive from Blackness’ contested point of view. As Hartman reconstructs the lost life of Esther Brown, she weaves a rhetorical argument gesturing towards the metaphysical restructuring of power dynamics established by the archive: Blackness carries inside itself an excess that should be embraced for its revolutionary potential. 221 Critical Fabulation’s attempt to “jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done” should not

221 Hartman, “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner.”

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be observed simply as a historical intervention which contests the archive’s rhetorical account, but also must also be analyzed as a rhetorical intervention that launches arguments that counter the signification of the archive. 222 The intervention does not attempt to repair the damaged caused by the archive, but instead endeavors to view “past the crack” to produce an radical Black imaginary that sees beyond the world of globalized antiBlackness and envisions the potential for a new order and space for

Blackness. 223

Monae mimics this sentiment as Jane begins to develop radical imaginaries inside of her embodied subjectivity that flout the commands of the cleaners. “What is that? That is not a memory?” the cleaner’s concern illustrates how critical fabulation advances rebuttals to the archive that re-signifies Blackness outside of abjection. This resignification allows Black bodies to manufacture subaltern identifications which enable the Black body to embrace itself with redemptive self-love that helps Blackness navigate through material conditions of the anti-Black social order. The cleaners’ inability to grasp or delete Jane’s fabulations speaks to the durable nature of this rhetorical intervention.

Counter to the archive’s affective assimilation, Critical fabulation releases a radicalizing affect within the embodied subjectivity of Blackness that both precedes and exceeds the surveillance of the archive and the interpretation of American Grammar. Jane’s imaginaries insert an additional counter rhetorical argument which destabilizes the symbolic order: Black Life radiates an erotic social poiesis that makes survival in an anti-

Black world an art form. 224 Critical fabulation offers Blackness a conjured history that

222 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” June 1, 2008. 223 Harney and Moten, “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.” 224 Hartman, “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner.”

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defies the American Grammar of the archive and produces an adorning affect that celebrates Blackness’ cultural, sexual, and physical expression and rejects the pathologization of the archive. 225

Mary Apple: It’s as if she remembers me. Like, really knows me… she tells me things about myself. She said that my name was Zen, I made films, played instruments and… She says that we were in love Mother Superior: That’s enough. Now you know that’s impossible. A dirty mind will do anything to survive. 226

The exchange above between Mary Apple and the warden of New Dawn, Mother

Superior, expresses the communal implications of critical fabulation. The furtive communication shared between Jane and Mary Apple as well as Karease and myself provides Black people space to process the imperceptible violence that everyday whiteness enacts upon them and allows them to inhabit a space “abandoned by colonialism, by rule, by order.” 227 Karease and I were not healed that night, we are far from recovered now, but the relationship we developed alleviated the burden of antiBlackness’ mephitic affects that caused us psychic and spiritual fatigue. That night, we uttered noises that wailed against the iniquitousness of American Grammar to speak into existence a critical counter rhetorical argument: No slave time now. Abolition now.228 Our clandestine communication refused our status as chattel and developed a subversive intellectualism that cultivated the present absence of Blackness.

Esther’s praxis of mutual aid, a form of mutual assistance based on traditions of collectivity made “in the hold of the slave ship, the plantation, and the ghetto,” displays

225 Jones, “The Will to Adorn.” 226 “Janelle Monáe - Dirty Computer [Emotion Picture] - YouTube.” 227 Harney and Moten, “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.” 228 Hartman, “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner.”

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the communal efficacy of furtive communication. 229 Furtive communication bolsters an intimate rhetoric that fashions a queer relationality among Black people that rehabilitates the archive’s malformation of Black kinship. Mary Apple exhibits the restorative influence of furtive communication through her character development. Her secluded discussions with Jane engendered a poiesis that reawakens her memories and love of

Jane. Mary Apple and Jane’s reawakening enables them to form kinship through the

“brokenness of being” that kinship allowed them devise fugitivity planning that facilitated their escape and abolishment of New Dawn. Furtive communication advances a rhetoric of the intimate that makes possible an undercommons that refuse the interpellation of the archive and embraces the exploration of “wild beyond to the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us.” 230

Conclusion

Critical fabulation produces a rhetorical intervention that investigates the archive’s rhetorical process of surveilling, criminalizing, detaining, and pathologization of Blackness to provides rhetorical intervention that charts the social poesies of quare

Black lives. This intervention re-discovers Black epistemologies cleansed by the archive which allows Blackness to project an uncapturable clamor that challenges the establish order of the anti-Black world. The critical fabulations of Esther Brown, Cindi, and I establish our own rhetorical arguments that expose the structural antagonisms inflicted upon quare Black femmes throughout time. These fabulations also demonstrates how the

229 Hartman. 230 Hartman.

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intracommunal adornment of quare Black desire leads to radical fugitivity planning that dares to demand a world where globalized anti-Blackness is abolished.

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Works Cited

Introduction

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment . London, UNITED STATES: Taylor & Francis Group, 2002. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=178421. Gilman, Sander L. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (October 1985): 204–42. https://doi.org/10.1086/448327. Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study,” n.d., 174. “Hartman 2008 Venus in Two Acts.Pdf,” n.d. Hartman, Saidiya. “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner.” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (July 1, 2018): 465–90. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-6942093. ———. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (June 1, 2008): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1. Jones, Melanie C. “The Will to Adorn: Beyond Self-Surveillance, Toward a Womanist Ethic of Redemptive Self-Love.” Black Theology 16, no. 3 (July 11, 2018): 218– 30. https://doi.org/10.1080/14769948.2018.1492303. Klein, Lauren F. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” American Literature 85, no. 4 (December 1, 2013): 661–88. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2367310. Li, Stephanie. “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s ‘Corregidora.’” Callaloo 29, no. 1 (2006): 131–50. Ponton, David. “Clothed in Blue Flesh: Police Brutality and the Disciplining of Race, Gender, and the ‘Human.’” Theory & Event 19, no. 3 (July 8, 2016). https://muse.jhu.edu/article/623994. Shabazz, Demetria. “Racializing ‘the Male Gaze’: Images of Black Women in American Cinema.” Conference Papers -- International Communication Association , Annual Meeting 2008, 1. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/464747. Stephanie E. Smallwood. “The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved.” History of the Present 6, no. 2 (2016): 117. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.6.2.0117. Warren, Calvin L. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation . Duke University Press, 2018. Warren, Kellee E. “We Need These Bodies, but Not Their Knowledge: Black Women in the Archival Science Professions and Their Connection to the Archives of Enslaved Black Women in the French Antilles.” Library Trends 64, no. 4 (2016): 776–94. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2016.0012.

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Whitney. “Affective Indigestion: Lorde, Fanon, and Gutierrez-Rodriguez on Race and Affective Labor.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 30, no. 3 (2016): 278. https://doi.org/10.5325/jspecphil.30.3.0278. Whitney, Shiloh. “Affective Intentionality and Affective Injustice: Merleau-Ponty and Fanon on the Body Schema as a Theory of Affect.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 56, no. 4 (2018): 488–515. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjp.12307. ———. “Byproductive Labor: A Feminist Theory of Affective Labor beyond the Productive–Reproductive Distinction.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 44, no. 6 (July 2018): 637–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453717741934.

Chapter 1

Barchiesi, Franco. "BLACKNESS AND LABOR IN THE AFTERLIVES OF RACIAL SLAVERY", Edited by Franco Barchiesi and Shona N. Jackson ("International Labor and Working-Class History", 96). Accessed February 14, 2020. https://www.academia.edu/41059022/_BLACKNESS_AND_LABOR_IN_THE_AFTE RLIVES_OF_RACIAL_SLAVERY_edited_by_Franco_Barchiesi_and_Shona_N._Jacks on_International_Labor_and_Working-Class_History_96_. Bell, Derrick A. Jr. “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma.” Harvard Law Review 93 (1980 1979): 518. Bly, Lyz, and Kelly Wooten. Make Your Own History : Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century. Los Angeles, UNITED STATES: Litwin Books, 2011. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=3328236. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London, UNITED STATES: Taylor & Francis Group, 2002. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=178421. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952. “Frank B. Wilderson III - The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents - InTensions - Issue 5.0 - Fall/Winter 2011.” Accessed December 8, 2019. http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/frankbwildersoniii.php. Gillespie. “Black Dada Nihilismus: Theorizing a Radical Black Aesthetic.” Critical Ethnic Studies 4, no. 2 (n.d.): 100. Gilman, Sander L. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (October 1985): 204–42. https://doi.org/10.1086/448327. Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study,” n.d., 174. “Hartman 2008 Venus in Two Acts.Pdf,” n.d. Hartman, Saidiya. “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner.” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (July 1, 2018): 465–90. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-6942093.

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———. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, no. 26 (2008): 1–14. ———. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (June 1, 2008): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1. Holland, Sharon Patricia. The Erotic Life of Racism. Durham, UNITED STATES: Duke University Press, 2012. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=1173297. Hunt, Steven B. “An Essay on Publishing Standards for Rhetorical Criticism.” Communication Studies 54, no. 3 (September 2003): 378–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970309363295. “Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings | American Literature | Duke University Press.” Accessed March 14, 2019. https://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article- abstract/85/4/661/4953. Isherwood, Charles, and Charles Isherwood. “Marie Christine.” Variety (blog), December 3, 1999. https://variety.com/1999/legit/reviews/marie-christine-1200460102/. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an AntiBlack World. NYU Press, 2020. ———. “‘Theorizing in a Void.’” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (July 2018): 617–48. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-6942195. “Janelle Monáe - Dirty Computer [Emotion Picture] - YouTube.” Accessed March 14, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdH2Sy-BlNE&t=917s. Johnson, E. Patrick. “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (January 2001): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462930128119. “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.,” n.d. Jones, Melanie C. “The Will to Adorn: Beyond Self-Surveillance, Toward a Womanist Ethic of Redemptive Self-Love.” Black Theology 16, no. 3 (July 11, 2018): 218–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/14769948.2018.1492303. Jr, George F. McHendry, Michael K. Middleton, Danielle Endres, Samantha Senda-Cook, and Megan O’Byrne. “Rhetorical Critic(Ism)’s Body: Affect and Fieldwork on a Plane of Immanence.” Southern Communication Journal 79, no. 4 (September 1, 2014): 293–310. https://doi.org/10.1080/1041794X.2014.906643. King, Tiffany Lethabo. “The Labor of (Re)Reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(Ly).” Antipode 48, no. 4 (2016): 1022–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12227. Klein, Lauren F. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” American Literature 85, no. 4 (December 1, 2013): 661–88. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2367310. Li, Stephanie. “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s ‘Corregidora.’” Callaloo 29, no. 1 (2006): 131–50. ———. “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” Callaloo 29, no. 1 (2006): 131–50. https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2006.0056. MacDonald, Michael B. “CRITICAL PEDAGOGY OF AESTHETIC SYSTEMS.” Counterpoints 475 (2016): 125–38. Mbembe, Achille. “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive,” n.d., 29.

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———. “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh, 19–27. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8_2. ———. “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh, 19–27. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8_2. McPhail, Mark Lawrence. “Dark Menexenus : Black Opportunism in an Age of Racial Anxiety.” Southern Communication Journal 75, no. 2 (March 31, 2010): 160–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/10417941003613255. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. U of Minnesota Press, 2003. “Neoliberal Economics, Capitalist Crises, and the ‘Representation Economy’ | Devyn Springer on Patreon.” Accessed February 7, 2020. https://www.patreon.com/posts/neoliberal-and-26149208. “NotesOnFeminism-2_SaidiyaHartman.Pdf.” Accessed November 6, 2019. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c805bf0d86cc90a02b81cdc/t/5db8b219 a910fa05af05dbf4/1572385305368/NotesOnFeminism-2_SaidiyaHartman.pdf. Nussbaum, Emily. “The Incendiary Aims of HBO’s ‘Watchmen.’” The New Yorker. Accessed March 22, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/the-incendiary-aims-of- hbos-watchmen. Nyongo, Tavia. “Unburdening Representation.” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (June 22, 2014): 70–81. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London, UNITED KINGDOM: Routledge, 2003. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=179272. Ponton, David. “Clothed in Blue Flesh: Police Brutality and the Disciplining of Race, Gender, and the ‘Human.’” Theory & Event 19, no. 3 (July 8, 2016). https://muse.jhu.edu/article/623994. “PRESCOTT, ORVILLE. ‘Books of the Times.’ The New York Times, April 16, 1952.” Accessed March 22, 2020. http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/99/06/20/specials/ellison-invisible2.html. “Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man. (New York, UNITED STATES: Vintage International, 1952.” Accessed December 5, 2019. https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/36300512/Ralph_Ellison_ -_Invisible_Man.pdf?response-content- disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DThe_invisible_man.pdf&X-Amz- Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz- Credential=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A%2F20191205%2Fus-east- 1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20191205T213933Z&X-Amz- Expires=3600&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-

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Signature=e7e81cc80613fc8250681e361613f7d597aa61a19c5da75772e13da43f 882c30. Reeves, Charles H. “The Aristotelian Concept of the Tragic Hero.” The American Journal of Philology 73, no. 2 (1952): 172–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/291812. Reid-Brinkley, Shanara R. “Voice Dipped in Black.” The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, July 25, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199982295.013.28. Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. “The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy.” Midwest Studies In Philosophy 16, no. 1 (1991): 53–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475- 4975.1991.tb00230.x. Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. NYU Press, 2010. Shabazz, Demetria. “Racializing ‘the Male Gaze’: Images of Black Women in American Cinema.” Conference Papers -- International Communication Association, Annual Meeting 2008, 1. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016. Silva, Denise Ferreira da. “The Racial Limits of Social Justice: The Ruse of Equality of Opportunity and the Global Affirmative Action Mandate.” Critical Ethnic Studies 2, no. 2 (2016): 184–209. https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.2.2.0184. Simonson, Peter. “Rhetoric as a Sociological Problem.” Argumentation and Advocacy 50, no. 4 (March 2014): 242–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/00028533.2014.11821825. “Slavery as Contract: Betty’s Case and the Question of Freedom: Law & Literature: Vol 27, No 3.” Accessed December 10, 2019. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1535685X.2015.1058621?casa_t oken=sZKYxoud2SUAAAAA:RoByEy37Ojf57ZePukCTaTfPiESaMSHPPC2YAZtFBLBa qv6TehsqLJpUxKm4maZpnHLSukV7r2Y. Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism,” February 6, 1975. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating-fascism/. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/464747. Stephanie E. Smallwood. “The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved.” History of the Present 6, no. 2 (2016): 117. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.6.2.0117. Tyrone S. Palmer. “‘What Feels More Than Feeling?’: Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect.” Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 2 (2017): 31. https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.2.0031. Warren, Calvin L. “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope.” CR: The New Centennial Review 15, no. 1 (2015): 215–48. https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.15.1.0215. ———. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Duke University Press, 2018. Warren, Kellee E. “We Need These Bodies, but Not Their Knowledge: Black Women in the Archival Science Professions and Their Connection to the Archives of

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Enslaved Black Women in the French Antilles.” Library Trends 64, no. 4 (2016): 776–94. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2016.0012. “Whither the ‘Human’? An Open Letter to the ‘Race and Rhetoric’ Forum.” Accessed March 10, 2020. https://www.academia.edu/38023118/Whither_the_Human_An_Open_Letter_t o_the_Race_and_Rhetoric_Forum. Whitney. “Affective Indigestion: Lorde, Fanon, and Gutierrez-Rodriguez on Race and Affective Labor.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 30, no. 3 (2016): 278. https://doi.org/10.5325/jspecphil.30.3.0278. Whitney, Shiloh. “Affective Intentionality and Affective Injustice: Merleau-Ponty and Fanon on the Body Schema as a Theory of Affect.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 56, no. 4 (2018): 488–515. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjp.12307. ———. “Byproductive Labor: A Feminist Theory of Affective Labor beyond the Productive–Reproductive Distinction.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 44, no. 6 (July 2018): 637–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453717741934. Wilderson, Frank. “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (June 2003): 225–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350463032000101579. ———. “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (June 2003): 225–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350463032000101579. Wilderson, Frank B., III. Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U. S. Antagonisms. North Carolina, UNITED STATES: Duke University Press, 2010. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=1170634. Williams, Jaye Austin. “Radical Black Drama-as-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic on the Protracted Event-Horizon,” n.d., 25. ———. “Radical Black Drama-as-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic on the Protracted Event-Horizon,” n.d., 25. Woodard, Vincent, Justin A. Joyce, and Dwight A. McBride. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture. Sexual Cultures. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Woods, Tryon P. “‘Beat It like a Cop’The Erotic Cultural Politics of Punishment in the Era of Postracialism.” Social Text 31, no. 1 (114) (March 1, 2013): 21–41. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-1958881. Chapter 2

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Bell, Derrick A. Jr. “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma.” Harvard Law Review 93 (1980 1979): 518. Bly, Lyz, and Kelly Wooten. Make Your Own History : Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century. Los Angeles, UNITED STATES: Litwin Books, 2011. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=3328236. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London, UNITED STATES: Taylor & Francis Group, 2002. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=178421. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952. “Frank B. Wilderson III - The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents - InTensions - Issue 5.0 - Fall/Winter 2011.” Accessed December 8, 2019. http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/frankbwildersoniii.php. Gillespie. “Black Dada Nihilismus: Theorizing a Radical Black Aesthetic.” Critical Ethnic Studies 4, no. 2 (n.d.): 100. Gilman, Sander L. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (October 1985): 204–42. https://doi.org/10.1086/448327. Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study,” n.d., 174. “Hartman 2008 Venus in Two Acts.Pdf,” n.d. Hartman, Saidiya. “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner.” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (July 1, 2018): 465–90. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-6942093. ———. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, no. 26 (2008): 1–14. ———. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (June 1, 2008): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1. Holland, Sharon Patricia. The Erotic Life of Racism. Durham, UNITED STATES: Duke University Press, 2012. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=1173297. Hunt, Steven B. “An Essay on Publishing Standards for Rhetorical Criticism.” Communication Studies 54, no. 3 (September 2003): 378–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970309363295. “Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings | American Literature | Duke University Press.” Accessed March 14, 2019. https://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article- abstract/85/4/661/4953. Isherwood, Charles, and Charles Isherwood. “Marie Christine.” Variety (blog), December 3, 1999. https://variety.com/1999/legit/reviews/marie-christine-1200460102/. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an AntiBlack World. NYU Press, 2020. ———. “‘Theorizing in a Void.’” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (July 2018): 617–48. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-6942195.

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“Janelle Monáe - Dirty Computer [Emotion Picture] - YouTube.” Accessed March 14, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdH2Sy-BlNE&t=917s. Johnson, E. Patrick. “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (January 2001): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462930128119. “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.,” n.d. Jones, Melanie C. “The Will to Adorn: Beyond Self-Surveillance, Toward a Womanist Ethic of Redemptive Self-Love.” Black Theology 16, no. 3 (July 11, 2018): 218–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/14769948.2018.1492303. Jr, George F. McHendry, Michael K. Middleton, Danielle Endres, Samantha Senda-Cook, and Megan O’Byrne. “Rhetorical Critic(Ism)’s Body: Affect and Fieldwork on a Plane of Immanence.” Southern Communication Journal 79, no. 4 (September 1, 2014): 293–310. https://doi.org/10.1080/1041794X.2014.906643. King, Tiffany Lethabo. “The Labor of (Re)Reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(Ly).” Antipode 48, no. 4 (2016): 1022–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12227. Klein, Lauren F. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” American Literature 85, no. 4 (December 1, 2013): 661–88. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2367310. Li, Stephanie. “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s ‘Corregidora.’” Callaloo 29, no. 1 (2006): 131–50. ———. “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” Callaloo 29, no. 1 (2006): 131–50. https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2006.0056. MacDonald, Michael B. “CRITICAL PEDAGOGY OF AESTHETIC SYSTEMS.” Counterpoints 475 (2016): 125–38. Mbembe, Achille. “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive,” n.d., 29. ———. “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh, 19–27. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8_2. ———. “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh, 19–27. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8_2. McPhail, Mark Lawrence. “Dark Menexenus : Black Opportunism in an Age of Racial Anxiety.” Southern Communication Journal 75, no. 2 (March 31, 2010): 160–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/10417941003613255. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. U of Minnesota Press, 2003. “Neoliberal Economics, Capitalist Crises, and the ‘Representation Economy’ | Devyn Springer on Patreon.” Accessed February 7, 2020. https://www.patreon.com/posts/neoliberal-and-26149208. “NotesOnFeminism-2_SaidiyaHartman.Pdf.” Accessed November 6, 2019. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c805bf0d86cc90a02b81cdc/t/5db8b219 a910fa05af05dbf4/1572385305368/NotesOnFeminism-2_SaidiyaHartman.pdf.

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Nussbaum, Emily. “The Incendiary Aims of HBO’s ‘Watchmen.’” The New Yorker. Accessed March 22, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/the-incendiary-aims-of- hbos-watchmen. Nyongo, Tavia. “Unburdening Representation.” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (June 22, 2014): 70–81. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London, UNITED KINGDOM: Routledge, 2003. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=179272. Ponton, David. “Clothed in Blue Flesh: Police Brutality and the Disciplining of Race, Gender, and the ‘Human.’” Theory & Event 19, no. 3 (July 8, 2016). https://muse.jhu.edu/article/623994. “PRESCOTT, ORVILLE. ‘Books of the Times.’ The New York Times, April 16, 1952.” Accessed March 22, 2020. http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/99/06/20/specials/ellison-invisible2.html. “Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man. (New York, UNITED STATES: Vintage International, 1952.” Accessed December 5, 2019. https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/36300512/Ralph_Ellison_ -_Invisible_Man.pdf?response-content- disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DThe_invisible_man.pdf&X-Amz- Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz- Credential=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A%2F20191205%2Fus-east- 1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20191205T213933Z&X-Amz- Expires=3600&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz- Signature=e7e81cc80613fc8250681e361613f7d597aa61a19c5da75772e13da43f 882c30. Reeves, Charles H. “The Aristotelian Concept of the Tragic Hero.” The American Journal of Philology 73, no. 2 (1952): 172–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/291812. Reid-Brinkley, Shanara R. “Voice Dipped in Black.” The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, July 25, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199982295.013.28. Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. “The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy.” Midwest Studies In Philosophy 16, no. 1 (1991): 53–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475- 4975.1991.tb00230.x. Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. NYU Press, 2010. Shabazz, Demetria. “Racializing ‘the Male Gaze’: Images of Black Women in American Cinema.” Conference Papers -- International Communication Association, Annual Meeting 2008, 1. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016. Silva, Denise Ferreira da. “The Racial Limits of Social Justice: The Ruse of Equality of Opportunity and the Global Affirmative Action Mandate.” Critical Ethnic Studies 2, no. 2 (2016): 184–209. https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.2.2.0184.

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Simonson, Peter. “Rhetoric as a Sociological Problem.” Argumentation and Advocacy 50, no. 4 (March 2014): 242–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/00028533.2014.11821825. “Slavery as Contract: Betty’s Case and the Question of Freedom: Law & Literature: Vol 27, No 3.” Accessed December 10, 2019. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1535685X.2015.1058621?casa_t oken=sZKYxoud2SUAAAAA:RoByEy37Ojf57ZePukCTaTfPiESaMSHPPC2YAZtFBLBa qv6TehsqLJpUxKm4maZpnHLSukV7r2Y. Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism,” February 6, 1975. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating-fascism/. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/464747. Stephanie E. Smallwood. “The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved.” History of the Present 6, no. 2 (2016): 117. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.6.2.0117. Tyrone S. Palmer. “‘What Feels More Than Feeling?’: Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect.” Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 2 (2017): 31. https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.2.0031. Warren, Calvin L. “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope.” CR: The New Centennial Review 15, no. 1 (2015): 215–48. https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.15.1.0215. ———. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Duke University Press, 2018. Warren, Kellee E. “We Need These Bodies, but Not Their Knowledge: Black Women in the Archival Science Professions and Their Connection to the Archives of Enslaved Black Women in the French Antilles.” Library Trends 64, no. 4 (2016): 776–94. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2016.0012. “Whither the ‘Human’? An Open Letter to the ‘Race and Rhetoric’ Forum.” Accessed March 10, 2020. https://www.academia.edu/38023118/Whither_the_Human_An_Open_Letter_t o_the_Race_and_Rhetoric_Forum. Whitney. “Affective Indigestion: Lorde, Fanon, and Gutierrez-Rodriguez on Race and Affective Labor.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 30, no. 3 (2016): 278. https://doi.org/10.5325/jspecphil.30.3.0278. Whitney, Shiloh. “Affective Intentionality and Affective Injustice: Merleau-Ponty and Fanon on the Body Schema as a Theory of Affect.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 56, no. 4 (2018): 488–515. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjp.12307. ———. “Byproductive Labor: A Feminist Theory of Affective Labor beyond the Productive–Reproductive Distinction.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 44, no. 6 (July 2018): 637–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453717741934. Wilderson, Frank. “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (June 2003): 225–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350463032000101579. ———. “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (June 2003): 225–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350463032000101579.

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Wilderson, Frank B., III. Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U. S. Antagonisms. North Carolina, UNITED STATES: Duke University Press, 2010. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=1170634. Williams, Jaye Austin. “Radical Black Drama-as-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic on the Protracted Event-Horizon,” n.d., 25. ———. “Radical Black Drama-as-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic on the Protracted Event-Horizon,” n.d., 25. Woodard, Vincent, Justin A. Joyce, and Dwight A. McBride. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture. Sexual Cultures. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Woods, Tryon P. “‘Beat It like a Cop’The Erotic Cultural Politics of Punishment in the Era of Postracialism.” Social Text 31, no. 1 (114) (March 1, 2013): 21–41. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-1958881. Chapter 3

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Hartman, Saidiya. “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner.” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (July 1, 2018): 465–90. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-6942093. ———. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, no. 26 (2008): 1–14. ———. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (June 1, 2008): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1. Holland, Sharon Patricia. The Erotic Life of Racism. Durham, UNITED STATES: Duke University Press, 2012. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=1173297. Hunt, Steven B. “An Essay on Publishing Standards for Rhetorical Criticism.” Communication Studies 54, no. 3 (September 2003): 378–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970309363295. “Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings | American Literature | Duke University Press.” Accessed March 14, 2019. https://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article- abstract/85/4/661/4953. Isherwood, Charles, and Charles Isherwood. “Marie Christine.” Variety (blog), December 3, 1999. https://variety.com/1999/legit/reviews/marie-christine-1200460102/. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an AntiBlack World. NYU Press, 2020. ———. “‘Theorizing in a Void.’” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (July 2018): 617–48. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-6942195. “Janelle Monáe - Dirty Computer [Emotion Picture] - YouTube.” Accessed March 14, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdH2Sy-BlNE&t=917s. Johnson, E. Patrick. “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (January 2001): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462930128119. “Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Hachette UK, 2019.,” n.d. Jones, Melanie C. “The Will to Adorn: Beyond Self-Surveillance, Toward a Womanist Ethic of Redemptive Self-Love.” Black Theology 16, no. 3 (July 11, 2018): 218–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/14769948.2018.1492303. Jr, George F. McHendry, Michael K. Middleton, Danielle Endres, Samantha Senda-Cook, and Megan O’Byrne. “Rhetorical Critic(Ism)’s Body: Affect and Fieldwork on a Plane of Immanence.” Southern Communication Journal 79, no. 4 (September 1, 2014): 293–310. https://doi.org/10.1080/1041794X.2014.906643. King, Tiffany Lethabo. “The Labor of (Re)Reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(Ly).” Antipode 48, no. 4 (2016): 1022–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12227. Klein, Lauren F. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” American Literature 85, no. 4 (December 1, 2013): 661–88. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2367310. Li, Stephanie. “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s ‘Corregidora.’” Callaloo 29, no. 1 (2006): 131–50. ———. “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” Callaloo 29, no. 1 (2006): 131–50. https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2006.0056.

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MacDonald, Michael B. “CRITICAL PEDAGOGY OF AESTHETIC SYSTEMS.” Counterpoints 475 (2016): 125–38. Mbembe, Achille. “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive,” n.d., 29. ———. “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh, 19–27. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8_2. ———. “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh, 19–27. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8_2. McPhail, Mark Lawrence. “Dark Menexenus : Black Opportunism in an Age of Racial Anxiety.” Southern Communication Journal 75, no. 2 (March 31, 2010): 160–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/10417941003613255. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. U of Minnesota Press, 2003. “Neoliberal Economics, Capitalist Crises, and the ‘Representation Economy’ | Devyn Springer on Patreon.” Accessed February 7, 2020. https://www.patreon.com/posts/neoliberal-and-26149208. “NotesOnFeminism-2_SaidiyaHartman.Pdf.” Accessed November 6, 2019. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c805bf0d86cc90a02b81cdc/t/5db8b219 a910fa05af05dbf4/1572385305368/NotesOnFeminism-2_SaidiyaHartman.pdf. Nussbaum, Emily. “The Incendiary Aims of HBO’s ‘Watchmen.’” The New Yorker. Accessed March 22, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/the-incendiary-aims-of- hbos-watchmen. Nyongo, Tavia. “Unburdening Representation.” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (June 22, 2014): 70–81. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London, UNITED KINGDOM: Routledge, 2003. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=179272. Ponton, David. “Clothed in Blue Flesh: Police Brutality and the Disciplining of Race, Gender, and the ‘Human.’” Theory & Event 19, no. 3 (July 8, 2016). https://muse.jhu.edu/article/623994. “PRESCOTT, ORVILLE. ‘Books of the Times.’ The New York Times, April 16, 1952.” Accessed March 22, 2020. http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/99/06/20/specials/ellison-invisible2.html. “Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man. (New York, UNITED STATES: Vintage International, 1952.” Accessed December 5, 2019. https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/36300512/Ralph_Ellison_ -_Invisible_Man.pdf?response-content- disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DThe_invisible_man.pdf&X-Amz- Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz- Credential=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A%2F20191205%2Fus-east-

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1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20191205T213933Z&X-Amz- Expires=3600&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz- Signature=e7e81cc80613fc8250681e361613f7d597aa61a19c5da75772e13da43f 882c30. Reeves, Charles H. “The Aristotelian Concept of the Tragic Hero.” The American Journal of Philology 73, no. 2 (1952): 172–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/291812. Reid-Brinkley, Shanara R. “Voice Dipped in Black.” The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, July 25, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199982295.013.28. Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. “The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy.” Midwest Studies In Philosophy 16, no. 1 (1991): 53–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475- 4975.1991.tb00230.x. Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. NYU Press, 2010. Shabazz, Demetria. “Racializing ‘the Male Gaze’: Images of Black Women in American Cinema.” Conference Papers -- International Communication Association, Annual Meeting 2008, 1. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016. Silva, Denise Ferreira da. “The Racial Limits of Social Justice: The Ruse of Equality of Opportunity and the Global Affirmative Action Mandate.” Critical Ethnic Studies 2, no. 2 (2016): 184–209. https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.2.2.0184. Simonson, Peter. “Rhetoric as a Sociological Problem.” Argumentation and Advocacy 50, no. 4 (March 2014): 242–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/00028533.2014.11821825. “Slavery as Contract: Betty’s Case and the Question of Freedom: Law & Literature: Vol 27, No 3.” Accessed December 10, 2019. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1535685X.2015.1058621?casa_t oken=sZKYxoud2SUAAAAA:RoByEy37Ojf57ZePukCTaTfPiESaMSHPPC2YAZtFBLBa qv6TehsqLJpUxKm4maZpnHLSukV7r2Y. Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism,” February 6, 1975. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating-fascism/. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/464747. Stephanie E. Smallwood. “The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved.” History of the Present 6, no. 2 (2016): 117. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.6.2.0117. Tyrone S. Palmer. “‘What Feels More Than Feeling?’: Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect.” Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 2 (2017): 31. https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.2.0031. Warren, Calvin L. “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope.” CR: The New Centennial Review 15, no. 1 (2015): 215–48. https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.15.1.0215. ———. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Duke University Press, 2018.

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Warren, Kellee E. “We Need These Bodies, but Not Their Knowledge: Black Women in the Archival Science Professions and Their Connection to the Archives of Enslaved Black Women in the French Antilles.” Library Trends 64, no. 4 (2016): 776–94. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2016.0012. “Whither the ‘Human’? An Open Letter to the ‘Race and Rhetoric’ Forum.” Accessed March 10, 2020. https://www.academia.edu/38023118/Whither_the_Human_An_Open_Letter_t o_the_Race_and_Rhetoric_Forum. Whitney. “Affective Indigestion: Lorde, Fanon, and Gutierrez-Rodriguez on Race and Affective Labor.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 30, no. 3 (2016): 278. https://doi.org/10.5325/jspecphil.30.3.0278. Whitney, Shiloh. “Affective Intentionality and Affective Injustice: Merleau-Ponty and Fanon on the Body Schema as a Theory of Affect.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 56, no. 4 (2018): 488–515. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjp.12307. ———. “Byproductive Labor: A Feminist Theory of Affective Labor beyond the Productive–Reproductive Distinction.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 44, no. 6 (July 2018): 637–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453717741934. Wilderson, Frank. “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (June 2003): 225–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350463032000101579. ———. “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (June 2003): 225–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350463032000101579. Wilderson, Frank B., III. Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U. S. Antagonisms. North Carolina, UNITED STATES: Duke University Press, 2010. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=1170634. Williams, Jaye Austin. “Radical Black Drama-as-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic on the Protracted Event-Horizon,” n.d., 25. ———. “Radical Black Drama-as-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic on the Protracted Event-Horizon,” n.d., 25. Woodard, Vincent, Justin A. Joyce, and Dwight A. McBride. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture. Sexual Cultures. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Woods, Tryon P. “‘Beat It like a Cop’The Erotic Cultural Politics of Punishment in the Era of Postracialism.” Social Text 31, no. 1 (114) (March 1, 2013): 21–41. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-1958881.

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Nadia Hussein

402 Crowne Oaks Circle, 440-402-5534

Winston-Salem, NC 27106 [email protected]

EDUCATION Wake Forest University Winston-Salem, NC

M.A. in Communication (Current GPA: 3.777) Expected May 2020 Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Georgia State University Atlanta, GA

B.A. in Personal and Political Speech (GPA: 3.54) Dec 2017 Minor in Film.

PUBLICATIONS “We Are Here: Black Femme and Queer Insurgency in Debate.” Forthcoming Contemporary Argumentation and Debate Special Issue: Identity and Debate .

PRESENTATIONS & PANELS National Communication Association Baltimore, MD

“Surviving Graduate School as a Debate Coach: A Panel Discussion.” November 2019 Cross Examination Debate Association.

Communication 795 Forum Winston-Salem, NC

“We Are Here: Black Femme and Queer Insurgency in Debate.’” May 2019

P.A.L.M. T.R.E.E. Symposium, Graduate Student Division Miami, FL “What’s Affect Got to Do With It?” Dec 2019

Association of Black Argumentation Professionals

Harboring Innovation, 111th Annual ECA Convention. Baltimore, MD

“We Are Here: Black Femme and Queer Insurgency in Debate .” Forthcoming Argumentation and Forensics.

Popular Culture Association Philadelphia, PA

“99 Problems & Blue Lives Mattering is One: Brooklyn 99’s Promotion of Copaganda.” Forthcoming

Law and Popular Culture

RSA 19th Biennial Conference Portland, OR

“Dirty if You Were Different: The Archive’s Pathologization of Black Femme Excess.” Forthcoming

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Rhetorical Society of America

THESES

Wake Forest University Expected Feb 2020

Sick & Tired of These Broken Promithes, Promithes: Navigating the Seductive Promises of Black Representation and the In(ter)vention of Black Guerilla Expressionism Advisor: Ron Von Burg Committee: Alessandra Von Burg, Rowie Straker-Kirby, Calvin Warren

TEACHING & RESEARCH EXPERIENCE Wake Forest University Aug 2018-April 2019

Graduate Assistant Debate Coach

• Investigated critical university studies, critical international relations, critical global governance studies, trans theory, queer theory, settler colonial theory, and non-representational rhetoric • Built year-long critical curriculum on U.S., Chinese, and Russian outer-space policy • Worked with students to theorize decolonial spatial formations

Wake Forest University August 2019-present

Graduate Teaching Assistant, Wake Speaks

• Collaboratively implemented curriculum in argumentation, speech, and rhetoric • Graded student speeches and taught coursework in communication • Manages the Public Speaking Peer Consulting Center where volunteer students lead tutoring sessions for Public Speaking Course • Organizes public speaking events Wake Speaks and Wake Spooks where 8-12 speakers present speeches to audiences of 50-60 students

Victory Briefs Institute Summer, 2018, 2019

Lab Leader

• Built interdisciplinary critical curriculum on U.S. education policy, U.S. housing policy, and U.S. international nuclear politics • Taught courses on critical histories of international relations theory, critical Black thought, transnational feminist theory, critical university studies, and performance studies • Mentored four individual students that developed intricate, interpersonal skill development and emotional support

Emory University August 2017-May 2018

Campus Engagement Fellowship, Emory Conversation Project

• Established Emory Conversation Project’s infrastructure by creating and developing meetings agendas, event schedules, and partnerships with other Emory campus organization • Developed the Barkely Forum’s relationship with campus community by hosting campus debate events like the Dooley Debates (approx. 100 students attended) and the International 145

Debate Forum (approx. 15 attended weekly) and World Café (approx. 20+ students attended monthly) • Promoted Emory Conversation Project events by running extensive social media campaign on the Emory Conversation Project’s Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and by creating, shooting, and editing the webseries “Meaningful Conversations” (viewable on ECP’s social media)

Atlanta Urban Debate League August 2014-May 2017

Weekly Debate Instructor

• Enriched students’ critical thinking skills by providing with a debate education that is provided in schools • Improved students’ social mobility by improving confidence with public speaking and teaching them rhetorical strategies that allow them to advocate for social change • Promoted student tournament performance by offering instruction on new debate strategies such as critical theory and argumentation structure

MEMBERSHIPS & AFFILIATIONS

National Communication Association Cross Examination Debate Association Wake Speaks Barkley Forum AWARDS

Wake Forest University Graduate Assistantship 2018, 2019

Georgia State University 2013, 2014, 2014, 2016, 2017 Hope Scholarship 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 Pell Grant Deans List 2013, 2015, 2016 JV Champion Hurricane Debates at Miami University 2016 Octafinalist American Debate Association Fall 2016 Championship

Emory University 2017, 2018 Melissa Wade Maxcy Campus Engagement Fellowship

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